N.J. Woman’s Heart Handed To Her On Valentine’s Day… Literally

NEWARK, NJ — This Valentine’s Day, a 48-year-old woman literally had her heart handed to her in New Jersey.

On Tuesday, Rockaway Township resident Lisa Salberg was discharged from Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, freshly removed from one of the strangest Valentine’s Day experiences the Garden State has seen in recent years.

That’s because Salberg – a heart transplant patient – got the chance to hold her diseased, removed organ in her hands before leaving the hospital.

Salberg is not your typical heart transplant patient (if there is such a thing). According to hospital administrators, she’s been battling a genetic heart condition since the age of 12. After losing her sister to the same disease 20 years ago, she started a foundation - the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association - to educate others about her condition, a disorder that thickens the walls of the heart and disrupts the blood flow.

“Her passion for raising awareness and educating the public about this condition is so great that when she was put on the list for heart transplant, the first thing she asked her physician for was her heart,” Beth Israel administrators told Patch.

Why?

“She wanted to see it and use it to help others to show people exactly what a diseased heart looks like,” administrators explained.

After a consultation with her cardiologist, Mark Zucker, and her surgeon, Margarita Camacho, Salberg got the green light to take her old heart home to use as a research and teaching tool to help educate others about her disease, administrators said.

The heart is now on its way to Ohio University where it will be plasticized so that Salberg can take it on the road for speaking engagements.

And what was it like to literally hold her heart in her hands? Patch reached out to Salberg, who provided this reply:

“Emotionally it was like I was saying goodbye to a dear friend, almost like a funeral. Logically, I was fascinated by the density and weight of my heart and astounded to realize that just a few hours earlier, this was my life and now it was still… and I was still alive.”

Photos: Newark Beth Israel Medical Center

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