An HIV-positive woman from New York met her heart donor’s family on Nov. 22 after undergoing the world’s first HIV-positive to HIV-positive heart transplant.
Miriam Nieves received the world’s first #HIV+ to HIV+ #HeartTransplant in April.?
Today, she met the family of the donor who saved her life by giving her a heart and a kidney—and a new lease on life.@MonteHeart @MontefioreID pic.twitter.com/5c0e6cvPOH
— Montefiore Health System (@MontefioreNYC) November 22, 2022
The meeting happened in the Bronx at the Montefiore Einstein Medical Center. Miriam Nieves, 62, awaited to meet the family of her heart donor, Brittany Newton, after talking to Breanne, Brittany’s sister.
“When I talked to Breanne, I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to meet you,’ and when they walked into the room, and they stood up, I just wanted to embrace them, and the feeling was overwhelmingly good,” Nieves explained to Good Morning America.
HIV-positive Nieves endured heart and kidney failure, which impacted her everyday life before the surgery. Nieves said she struggled to get out of bed and interact with her family.
“That’s not how I am,” she said. “I’m usually the one that puts the band together so that we could eat together. I’m constantly pulling everybody to get together. And I was only existing; I really wasn’t living.”
The 62-year-old survivor needed two organ transplants and was matched with Brittany in April. Brittany died from a brain aneurysm at 30.
Breanne said that the meeting with Nieves was what she needed to finally gain some closure.
“It’s a blessing to know that my sister’s heart is going to be taken care of by her because she’s so sweet,” she said. “She kind of reminds me a little bit about my sister because she said that she likes to just get out and go and do things, and that’s how Brittany was.”
After her experience with Nieves, Breanne said that more people should become organ donors.
“I think that there should be more donors giving back,” she said. “It’s OK to give an organ to save someone else’s life. This brought more closure to me, knowing that my sister still lives on through her and maybe someone else as well, but just to know that her organs are still here and working and functioning good, it just brings so much joy to me.”
The doctor who performed Nieves’s surgery, Dr. Omar Saeed, said that the meeting was something the world could learn from.
“It’s Miriam’s courage and bravery and Brittany and her family’s incredible act of kindness and compassion, I think, that is really central to all of this. We can learn from that, we can all learn from it, and at that core, we can use science to expand these boundaries,” said Saeed. “We hope that this case demonstrates a doorway into the incredible power that donors with HIV have of saving other people’s lives, including donating their heart.”
Never encouraged those who are also HIV-positive not to give up hope and said that becoming a donor would allow them to save another HIV-positive person’s life.
