‘I need a new heart’
Ruby needs a heart transplant as soon as possible.
She is just 13-years-old and about to start high school, and yet Ruby Ballack was thrown in the deep end when she was diagnosed with a rare heart disease.
Ruby Ballack has “Restrictive Cardiomyopathy,” her mother, Wanda Ballack, told the News.
“One in a million children get this disease and Ruby has it. The heart muscles become stiff and the heart cannot pump blood to the rest of the body properly and it accumulates in the upper two heart chambers called the atrias,” she explained.
Wanda Ballack, Ruby’s mother, told the News that she knows the future prognosis for this disease is very poor.
Chest pain, heart palpitations, shortness of breath and fatigue plagued the 13-year-old recently Wanda decided to take her to a clinic where she got a referral to Leratong Regional Hospital about four months ago. A month later, she was diagnosed by a specialist with the rare disease.
“We thought she inherited asthma. We never thought anything else of it, as the symptoms looked like asthma,” Wanda said.
But doctors at Leratong found that Ruby’s heart was two and a half times the size it should be. Even Wanda thought she was looking at her daughter’s lungs on an X-ray, and not her heart. Ruby needs a heart transplant if she were to live a long life.
But according to Ruby’s doctor, young donor organs are very scarce and her pulmonary pressures very high, making a heart transplant for this aspiring artist, close to impossible.
Not ready to give up that easily, Wanda asked for help first from Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, where the first ever heart transplant was done by Dr Chris Barnard, and now from private medical institutions.
“I’m not really afraid of a heart transplant operation, I just don’t want to miss school after that,” Ruby said.
Ruby is a brave young girl who simply accepted her situation and is taking one day at a time. She can no longer play sports or even climb stairs as she gets short of breath easily. She can’t go to school because she is easily fatigued. She is also underweight and additionally suffers from Pulmonary Hypertension, a type of high blood pressure that affects the arteries in the lungs and the right side of your heart.
What gives Wanda even more hope, is knowing the oldest living woman with a donor heart, also lives in Krugersdorp. Hendrika van Wyk received a heart transplant at the age of 20 and now, 31 years later, she is still living life to the fullest.
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