Doctors at Jackson Memorial Medical Center in Miami kept a U.S teenager called D’Zhana Simmons from South Carolina alive for 118 days without a heart. They used custom-built artificial blood-pumping machine, until she was able to have a heart transplant.

Simmons said, living without a heart for a long time under with a blood pumping machine is “SCARY”.

“You never knew when it would malfunction,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, at a news conference at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center.

“It was like I was a fake person, like I didn’t really exist. I was just here,” she said of living without a heart.

Simmons who is 14 years old, suffered from what’s called “dilated cardiomyopathy” it’s a condition in which the patient’s heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently. Previously, Simmons had a heart transplant back in July but unfortunately the heart failed to function properly and was quickly removed.

“She essentially lived for 118 days without a heart, with her circulation supported only by the two blood pumps,” said Dr. Marco Ricci, the hospital’s director of pediatric cardiac surgery. During that time, Simmons was mobile but remained hospitalized.

According to Ricci, this is what believed to be the first pediatric patient who has received such a device in this configuration without the heart, and possibly one of the youngest that has been bridged to translations without her native heart.

After only a day after she had the second heart transplant, she had had a kidney transplant because she suffered from renal failure. But the good news is that Simmons is doing well, but there is a 50 percent chance that a heart transplant patient will need a new heart 12-13 years after the first surgery.