Despite her resilience, she kept experiencing unexpected setbacks: she underwent emergency brain surgery and two separate placements of Left Ventricular Assist Device<\/a>s (LVADs) to keep her heart pumping.<\/p>\n By 2023, McFarlan’s was seemingly out of options.<\/p>\n A doctor (stock image) She was ineligible for a traditional heart transplant because of the high levels of antibodies in her system that would reject a donor organ, meaning she had only days to live. “I had two days to two weeks to live to say my goodbyes,” Monica said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The path to this crisis began years earlier during what should have been a routine run. An avid runner training for her next marathon, McFarlan noticed an unusual shortness of breath<\/a>. At first, she tried to brush it off, telling TODAY.com<\/a>, “I’m just getting too old for this.”\u00a0<\/p>\n The breathlessness persisted, but it wasn’t until a nosebleed woke her up in the middle of the night that she decided to go to a local doctor, who brushed her symptoms off as anxiety.\u00a0 Everything came to a head that night, when the medication she was prescribed only made things worse, causing her to wake up and vomit profusely.<\/p>\n McFarlan and her husband went to the ER that night, where the medical team found her heart rate was “off-the-charts” high. Shortly after, they diagnosed her with congestive heart failure<\/a>.<\/p>\n McFarlan’s journey was relentless. In May 2011, she received a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) \u2014 a surgically implanted pump that takes over the left side of the heart and is powered by a battery pack worn outside the body. Two years later, a fall resulted in an emergency brain surgery that left her legally blind.<\/p>\n A year later, her heart briefly recovered enough to have the device removed. But that progress was short-lived; she suffered a heart attack that October, forcing her to receive a second LVAD in November. Complications followed, including a chronic infection, keeping her tethered to the medical system.<\/p>\n It wasn’t until the doctors told her there was nothing left to do that one came to her with a life-saving question. They proposed a Heart-After-Liver Transplant, or “HALT.”<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/people_218\/86050fedbc228dae15d10b1c0e81af3e.jpeg\"\/)
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