Cook surviving on artificial heart saved with donor heart in first-ever UCSF transplant

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- For the first time, surgeons at the University of California San Francisco implanted an artificial heart in a patient and later replaced it with a human heart.

Martell Taylor, a single father of three, said he has a new lease on life after being close to death just months ago.

His saga began three years when he began to feel weak and fatigued while working as a cook at the Meta campus in Menlo Park.

Taylor thought he had Covid but after several exams he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, the same condition that killed his mother and grandmother.

Last summer, his condition worsened.

"By then it was end-stage heart failure, so they had to do something fast. I had to make a decision to either get the artificial heart or I just wait and die," Taylor said.

Artificial heart implants are rare, with about 60 performed nationwide each year.

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"Generally, patients who need a total artificial heart don't have a lot of options. We're usually trying to get the patient to transplant, but they're too sick to wait for a donor organ to become available. So, we put the total artificial heart in as a bridge to the transplant," said Dr. Jason Smith, UCSF chief of cardiac surgery.

UCSF had not performed an artificial heart implant until Smith and Dr. Amy Fiedler joined the medical team in 2022. They performed the surgery on Taylor.

"The actual pump inside the patient is very reliable and durable. My longest patient on a total artificial heart is about a little over two years," Smith said.

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Patients with artificial hearts have tubes extending from their chest that connect to a machine carried in a backpack.

"It was nerve wracking just to have a machine pumping my heart for me. I was scared to death because I didn't have a heart for months," Taylor said.

Taylor said he had to be cautious around his toddler daughter, who wanted to press the machine's buttons or pull at the tubes.

About 4,000 people are on the national waiting list for a heart transplant, with nearly half waiting at least a year.