Annie Esperanza

Welcome to the  CaringBridge website we've set up for Annie Esperanza. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Right now it is a work in progress, as we wanted to get the word out far and wide. Thank you for visiting!      It’s been over twenty years since Annie first became a heart patient at Stanford Medical Center. Now she’s back—one of the first patients in the brand new wing of the hospital. Here is a brief synopsis of the emerging story.  Annie arrived at Stanford at the end of October for a scheduled ablation procedure in hopes of improving her heart function; however, that did not come to pass as planned. When she arrived at the hospital her doctors shifted the focus to stabilizing and assessing. The revised consensus was that the procedure was not likely to be successful, so they began to explore Plan B. Which is...a heart transplant.   After a battery of tests over the course of two weeks, her case was ultimately presented to the transplant team at Stanford. Turns out she is an excellent transplant candidate, and they agreed to put her name forward. Long story short: on Friday 11/15/19, she was approved as a transplant patient and put on the national list of potential heart recipients. So after just a few days at home to gather her wits, she returned to Stanford on 11/16. That morning the transplant team briefed her on next steps. The first step is to put a catheter into her heart via a vein in her neck which will provide continuous data on her heart function.  Then they keep her as healthy as possible while waiting. How long do they expect it to take before a heart is available? Crazy fast—apparently it can be as little as between two days to two weeks. Of course there is no way to tell, but that’s what the data would suggest—obviously it could take longer if the right heart does not become available. So things have gotten very real very fast.   After transplant, she will be hospitalized for at least 3 weeks. Upon release she will live nearby Stanford for at least 3 months. The plan is for her brother Henry to come out from Thailand to stay with her during that transition, with help from her sister Eddie and her tribe of friends. We are all learning—this of course is farther out on the horizon.  We'll be updating this site regularly, and you are invited to post messages for Annie here.  She appreciates all of your support and good wishes as this amazing story unfolds!  Right now Annie has asked us all not to send flowers...but cards, letters and posts to this site are welcome! Here's her mailing address at the hospital: Annie Esperanza (Patient- Cardiology), Stanford Hospital, 500 Pasteur Drive, Stanford, CA 94305