JERSEYVILLE - For her fifth birthday, Stella Schultz received the biggest gift of all: a heart transplant.
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The little girl, who turned 5 on July 30, 2024, has spent the last 254 days in Children’s Hospital. But Stella is home now and recovering from the surgery, and her parents, Karrie and Matt Schultz, could not be more grateful to God and the people who have followed Stella’s story over the past eight months.
“We were in the basement earlier today and we heard feet running across the floor upstairs. That is music to our ears,” Karrie said. “God literally performed a miracle for her.”
Karrie spent most of the morning writing down a list of miracles that God has performed for Stella. She remembers the beginning of Stella’s illness, when her daughter’s days of being a healthy and energetic 4-year-old suddenly stopped. Stella’s heart wasn’t squeezing, and she was quickly becoming very sick.
Within five days at Children’s, Stella was put on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a form of life support. Only 47% of patients will survive this. The “saving grace,” Karrie remembered, is that she and Matt didn’t know this statistic at the time.
“Her even surviving ECMO, just getting her off of it was a miracle in itself, because she was really sick, and we didn’t really — that’s the weird thing about it,” Karrie said. “We didn’t really know how sick she was, and then we had doctors all telling us afterwards, like, very, very, very sick, very fast. It happened so fast.”
More bad news struck. The doctors discovered a blood clot on her heart and told Matt and Karrie that it was a matter of when, not if, the clot would travel to her brain or lungs, causing either a stroke or a pulmonary embolism.
Terrified, Karrie took to Facebook. She created a new page — “A Heart For Stella” — and began posting to keep her family updated. Soon, family, friends and even strangers from around the world were following Stella’s story. With thousands of people praying for their daughter, the Schultz family began to feel less alone.
But Stella wasn’t out of the woods yet. The doctors asked for Matt and Karrie’s consent to put her on a ventricular device, or VAD. While Matt was immediately on board, Karrie struggled with the decision.
“I laid over her lap and I just closed my eyes and I pictured my baby with Jesus, because I knew that was the alternative,” Karrie remembered. “My husband on the other hand, he’s like, ‘Where do I sign? Let’s get the VAD in her. Let’s give her a chance.’ But I had to sit there for a minute and just think of the alternative. Do I want to put my baby through this? I already know right where she will be. I know who she’s going to be with. I know it’s kind of crazy for me to say, but in my heart, I knew exactly who she was going to be with. So I had to think about it for a minute. And like I said, my husband was very much like, ‘Let’s sign the paper.’ Of course, that’s what we did.”
Stella’s VAD, or “heart helper,” as she calls it, kept her alive, but she needed a transplant. Reflecting on it now, Karrie can see God working through every chapter of Stella’s story. But as the months dragged by with no news of a donor, she began to question.
Thousands of people were praying for Stella. Karrie prayed for her daughter and for another, anonymous child she didn’t know. She agonized over the idea of someone losing their life so Stella could receive a heart.
Meanwhile, Stella got sicker.
“We waited longer than everybody told us we had to wait,” Karrie said. “There were a lot of times where I was sitting in the garden and I’d just cry out and say, ‘God, do you not see us here? Do you not hear us here? Do you not see us?’ I picture myself as this tiny, tiny being in this huge world, and I just kind of let myself believe that God wasn’t going to answer the prayer and God wasn’t seeing me, because I had watched friends of ours, little boys, be transplanted, and they were waiting so much less than us. And it just kind of stung. It just hurt.”
And then, last week, they received the news: Stella had a heart. She underwent a successful heart transplant and woke up just in time for her fifth birthday.
The heart was a negative crossmatch, which requires less medication. After a follow-up appointment the other day, there are no signs of rejection. Stella’s body rehabbed quicker than expected. Karrie and Matt give all praise to God.
“I guess what I’m saying is at the very end of the day and after all this is done, it’s very evident that God picked out the most perfect heart for her,” Karrie said. “I just feel like the Lord picked out the very, very best heart for her. It just is so evident of God’s perfect timing and how we can try to do it our way and try to make our own plans, but at the end of the day, it’s God’s work and God’s timing. I just think Stella is a testimony to that.”
After seven months on the transplant list, 254 days in the hospital, and the fight of her life, Stella is home. Not only is she home, she’s well — and Karrie and Matt are more grateful than they can say. They’ve spent the past few days playing, at the park, and enjoying their daughter.
“She’s been put in time-out a couple of times, which makes us all so happy that she’s back to her sassy self,” Karrie laughed. “She settled in really good. She slept in her own bed the first night. She just has not stopped playing. And one of the sweetest things that happened, she stepped outside the other day to put her shoes on, and she said, ‘Mommy, you hear those birds?’ And we hear birds all the time, but just for her to acknowledge that she hears birds — what a sweet but simple but complex thing for her to hear.”
Karrie puts all of it in God’s hands. She will continue to post on the “A Heart For Stella” Facebook page, both with updates on Stella and prayer requests for the other kids they met during their time at Children’s Hospital. She said it’s “surreal” to see how Stella’s story has resonated with so many people, but she is so excited to know that, really, the story is just beginning.
“From day one, I would pray over Stella, and I would just pray to God, ‘Let Stella’s story glorify You. Let her little life just show the goodness of You and let me be a vessel for that,’” Karrie said. “If I could just sum it up in a couple of sentences, it would just be that the goodness of God still exists, even if life is not good. He’s still good every day when life is not good. I think that’s what’s probably most important to look back on this whole thing.”
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