MACUNGIE, Pa. – A powerful story of survival in the Lehigh Valley: A young woman from Macungie is sharing how she made it through a heart transplant, a stroke that left her paralyzed, and beat cancer twice.
“My name is Caroline,” Caroline Laubach says in a new Instagram video.
Caroline is like a lot of 21-year-old women, except her story twists and turns in ways you wouldn’t believe.
“I’m a heart transplant recipient. I’m disabled, and I beat cancer,” she goes on to say.
Let’s backpedal to where Caroline’s medical story begins. The 18-year-old says she had a great group of friends at Millersville University, where she was studying Secondary English.
She started experiencing “weird” unexplained respiratory symptoms, such as a dry cough, which progressively got worse.
“I was, like, crawling on the floor of my dorm to the bathroom because I, like, couldn’t breathe,” said Caroline.
Doctors first told Caroline it could be an upper respiratory infection. One thought the symptoms could be linked to her childhood asthma. Then, she got told she had walking pneumonia.
She took antibiotics, which helped initially.
“I started getting a little bit better, ‘better,'” she said. “I went back to school for about 24 hours, and at that point, I couldn’t keep food, water, cough medicine, anything down.”
Later blood work would show the 18-year-old was actually suffering from liver, kidney, and end-stage heart failure.
“Yeah, it was crazy,” Caroline said.
Doctors told Caroline’s family she should be moved from Lehigh Valley Cedar Crest to another hospital, where she could receive even more advanced care.
They chose the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was quickly moved to the ICU.
“The doctors knew that something was like critically wrong,” Caroline explained.
Deep in Caroline’s heart, she knew she wouldn’t be going back to college for a while, and the magnitude of that was tough to stomach. Caroline needed a heart transplant. Three days before the surgery, things took another terrifying turn.
“I started having some numbness and tingling in my legs and feet, and I felt like it was very difficult to move,” she said.
Caroline suffered a spinal stroke when a tube from a machine helping to pump blood restricted blood flow to her back.
“They took me pretty much into like another emergency surgery to crack my chest open and actually place an ECMO cannula directly into my chest,” she stated. “That’s when my family was told to start making death plans for me.”
Thankfully, Caroline was able to get a new heart from a woman in her forties, who suffered a traumatic brain injury. When asked if she wanted to donate hers, Caroline says she replied with an immediate, “yes,” and that she felt a new sense of purpose.
Things settled for a few months.
“That September, I woke up one day with a really swollen tonsil,” she said.
Now, Caroline faced a new challenge: Cancer.
“It was a lot. It was on my left tonsil. It was on lymph nodes next to my heart. It was in my upper GI, lower GI, and on my bladder wall,” added the young woman. “I had always planned out exactly who I wanted to be in my future. All of a sudden, it just felt like it blew up in my face.”
Since then, Caroline has beat cancer — not once but — twice, thanks to special treatment, and she’s not letting paralysis keep her from living.
She just got accepted to Cedar Crest College, where she’ll pursue an undergraduate degree in nutrition and a doctorate in occupational therapy. She describes the switch in majors as 180-degree change from where she started.
“I can’t wait to just start helping other people,” she said.
She finds comfort in the transplant community.
“I struggled for a long time just feeling human,” said the transplant survivor. “Finding this community, or this community finding me, it just lightens that load so much more.”
She hopes sharing her story helps someone, too.
“When you have these constant body pains and this irregular heartbeat and not being able to breathe, it’s a symptom of something much bigger,” explained Caroline.
She urges people to go get checked out at the doctor.
Caroline has since taken steps to connect with the family of the woman whose heart saved her life, and she says she’s trying to see her whole situation in a new, more optimistic light.
She says her new year resolution is to be more Zen and take things day by day.
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