Author, attorney, and speaker Amy Silverstein was a passionate 24-year-old law student when she unexpectedly found out she had a failing heart. Despite having a post-transplant life expectancy of about 10 years at most, she had transplant surgery when she was 25 and was blessed with a donor heart that beat strongly and gave her life for over three decades.
Amy, who had a kidney transplant before graduating from NYU School of Law, worked as a corporate attorney before launching her writing career. She married Scott, her great love, and gladly gave birth to a kid. She quickly quit her work as a lawyer and started writing.
A well-known heart transplant patient is Amy Silverstein. Her first transplant was performed in 1988, using a 13-year-old girl who was murdered in a vehicle accident as the donor. When the donor’s heart stopped working after 26 years, Silverstein had a second transplant in 2014.
Amy Silverstein, who at the age of 50 got her second successful heart transplant, credits nine of her friends for saving her life. Her first novel, Sick Girl (Grove Atlantic), was published in 2007. Let’s find out more about Amy Silverstein’s life and death.
Death and Obituary for Amy Silverstein
The news of Amy Silverstein’s death startled many of her followers. According to CBS Sunday Morning, she died away today, Sunday, May 7, 2023. On Friday, Amy, 59, died away. Public disclosure of the cause of death is still pending.
In her brand-new book, “My Glory Was I Had Such Friends,” 53-year-old Silverstein claims that her friends made sure she never felt alone and even created a spreadsheet calendar to arrange their time in the hospital. She discusses her experiences living with a new heart for more than 20 years in a New York Times column titled “My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon.”
Last month, Amy Silverstein was given a grim cancer prognosis. The author of Sick Girl said goodbye to her heart in an editorial for the New York Times. In other words, she bids farewell to the heart that beats within her after receiving a transplant.
The Career of Amy Silverstein
Amy is a well-known speaker and author on topics such as women’s health and resilience, the advantages of being present at every doctor’s appointment, and the necessity of patient-centric practices in medicine.
She has written papers for the American Journal of Transplantation and the Transplant Infectious Disease literature.
She has served as a designated representative for the American Society of Transplantation, the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, the American Society of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics, and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Executive Board. Nearly 26 years after Amy’s transplant, the donor’s heart died as a result of vasculopathy, an incurable disease that affects many long-lasting transplanted hearts.
Amy’s physicians in New York told her that owing to the severity and complexity of her disease, her best hope in life was to go across the country where she may get state-of-the-art procedures that would allow her to safely have a second transplant there. There was little likelihood that a donor heart would be discovered at that time since she was losing her beating quickly.
When Amy and Scott boarded a plane with cautious optimism, her friends left everything behind and followed in a continual rotation to be at her side in a hospital room in California. While she waited for a donor’s heart, Amy spent the last two and a half months sleeping close to friends every night.
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