US teenager lives 118 days without heart

An American teenager survived for nearly four months without a heart, kept alive by a custom-built artificial blood-pumping device, until she was able to have a heart transplant, doctors in Miami said on Wednesday. The doctors said they knew of another case in which an adult had been kept alive in Germany for nine months without a heart but said they believed this was the first time a child had survived in this manner for so long. The patient, D'Zhana Simmons of South Carolina, said the experience of living for so long with a machine pumping her blood was "scary". - People's Daily Online