First Heart Transplant
As of April 1985, only two heart transplants had been performed in the Carolinas, both at Duke University Medical Center in Durham. That all changed on Jan. 6, 1986. At Charlotte Memorial Hospital (now Carolinas Medical Center) in Charlotte, Sanger Clinic physicians performed Charlotte's first successful heart transplant. It took seven hours.

The patient, 31-year-old Sandra Collier had cardiomyopathy. This degenerative disease had weakened her heart's ability to pump blood. She would have died in two to four weeks without a transplant. Her weak and bloated heart was about the size of a cantaloupe, 40 percent bigger than normal. The 17-year-old donor was critically injured New Year's Eve while riding in a car that slid off an icy road.

Unfortunately, though the first heart transplant went as planned, after several hours the patient's right ventricle started to fail. It became apparent that unless another heart was implanted she certainly would not survive, so Collier received a second donor heart from a 25-year-old. The second transplant was performed less than 24 hours after the first one, minutes before midnight on Jan. 6, 1986.

Collier went home 5 1/2 weeks later and took daily doses of multiple medications - more than $325 a month - to keep her body from rejecting the donor organ. She lived another 13 years, enough time to complete one of her goals - raising her four young children.

First Pediatric Heart Transplant
In Dec. 2, 1989, 12-year-old Everett Martin was the first child to receive a heart transplant at The Carolinas Heart Institute at Charlotte Memorial Hospital & Medical Center (which became Carolinas Medical Center in 1989). He received the heart from a 22-year-old who had died during surgery at a Columbia hospital. Only three other children in North Carolina had heart transplants, two in Durham and one in Winston-Salem. Prior to Everett, the youngest heart transplant patient at the Carolinas Heart Institute was a 27 year old.

Brandi Mason received the second pediatric heart transplant on Dec. 27, 1989. She was 10 years old.

On June 8, 1990, 1-month-old Jessica Marr (at right with her parents and physicians) became the first infant at Carolinas Medical Center to get a heart transplant. Like most other infants requiring transplants, Marr suffered from a congenital heart defect, or structural abnormality.

All three transplants were performed by surgeons from The Sanger Clinic.