MADELEINE HETEM - The Life She Was Given
- Red Cross Hospital
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
By Red Heart Hospital
Fifty-four years after her first open heart transplant, she still holds on to the little suitcase, smaller than her handbag, that she came to Cape Town in the hope of healing.
As a toddler Madeleine was always tired and remembers how the hot weather left her breathless and she would sweat through her clothes from almost nothing. Madeleine recalls, “I didn’t feel different as a child, mostly tired, but I knew they treated me different. Much “softer” than my brother.”
A Johannesburg physician named Dr Ron Tucker confirmed what her mother had known since she was eighteen months old: two holes in her heart, one in the upper chamber and one in the lower. Her heart had been working against itself from her first breath.
When the doctors finally said she was ready, her father booked them on the Blue Train from Johannesburg to Cape Town.
On 21 March 1972, Madeleine was admitted to the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital. She was four years old. Her surgeon was Dr Christiaan Barnard. Barnard had been performing open-heart surgeries on children at this hospital since 8 September 1958, the date he carried out the first open-heart surgery on a child in South Africa. By the time Madeleine arrived, fourteen years on, it was established work. The cardiac team was operating on an average of 180 children a year.
Of her weeks at the hospital, she remembers only two things clearly. The heartache of her mother leaving every night, because mothers were not allowed to stay. And the Oros they gave her each evening. She cannot touch the stuff today. The smell of hospitals still undoes her. Years later, when her father was seriously ill, she would walk into the ward, and the panic attacks would come regardless.
What happened in theatre she learned afterwards, through her mother. Dr Venter, her mother’s cousin’s husband and an anaesthetist, had been given rare permission to remain during the surgery. He sent handwritten updates to her parents throughout: “Things are progressing. Looking good.” What the notes did not say was that Dr Chris Barnard had opened her chest, assessed the damage, and told the team to close. There was nothing he could do.
Venter spoke to him quietly, “I know her parents. They are sitting outside. Please, have one more look.” Barnard went back in, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Madeleine’s first memory after the operation was simple: “Now I can play rough with my brother.” And she did. She ran. She became a tomboy. She threw herself into everything she had once watched from the sidelines. Later, she went to university with her two best friends and, as she puts it, “partied like a rock star.”
Her mother’s life changed too. After Madeleine’s recovery, she qualified as a tourist guide, building a career from the years once consumed by fear of losing her child. Madeleine followed in her footsteps. Today, she is a mother of two and runs a travel company with her husband, Rob.
“Rob is my stalwart,” she says. “Super loyal. Never wavering.” Without him, she believes, she would not have faced her second surgery with the same strength and confidence.
Watch Madeleine’s heartwarming video here:
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