Inside the Healing Temple: A Heart Transplant Surgeon Sets the Record Straight on Organ Donation

Q: Most donor hearts come from car accidents.

It is not true. A lot of donors are young people who died of drug overdose, strokes, or sudden brain aneurysms.

Q: It’s against my religion to donate my organs.

It’s not really in religion. If anything, religion encourages people to help others.

Barbara Doyle
May 1
7 min read

There is a moment in every heart transplant when the patient on the table has no heart at all. The old one is out. The new one is not yet in. The body is being kept alive by a machine the size of a kitchen appliance, humming in the corner of the operating room. For a few minutes, the chest cavity is open, quiet, and empty. It is a space where the most essential organ a person owns used to be, and where, very soon, a stranger’s heart will start beating in its place.

“That’s a very empty feeling when you look in,” says Dr. Dina Al Rameni, a heart transplant surgeon at Hartford Hospital. “But you think, I can’t wait to fill you up again.”

It is one of the most extraordinary descriptions of modern medicine you will hear. It is also, in a way, the perfect metaphor for everything Dr. Al Rameni wants the public to understand about organ donation. There is a gap. There is a wait. The only thing that closes it is a person, a stranger, who decided in advance that their final act on earth would be to save someone else’s life.

We sat down with Dr. Al Rameni for a long and candid conversation about her path from a small village in Jordan to one of the busiest transplant programs in New England, the misinformation she sees spread on social media, and the reason she still tears up when a donor heart starts beating in her hands.

“Like the ultimate form of altruism”

Photo of heart trasplant surgeon Dina Al Rameni, MD

Dr. Al Rameni was six years old when she decided she wanted to be a doctor. She grew up in a densely populated village in Jordan, a country that, as she puts it, “was kind of a buffer zone for the countries around it,” absorbing waves of refugees from the wars next door. War-zone injuries arrived constantly. Resources did not.

“I had very humble beginnings,” she says. “If I didn’t really study and elevate myself, there were no resources to depend on. My parents told us, it’s on you where you want to end up in this world.”

Education was the way out. Her sister, who had dreamed of being an electrical engineer, became an internist instead because a country with no industrial base offered no jobs in engineering. Her brother is now in medical school. Her father was an accountant, and her mother kept the home.

Dr. Al Rameni went to medical school at the University of Jordan, then pursued what she still calls “the American dream.” She completed five years of general surgery residency in Chicago, a year of heart and lung transplant fellowship at Memorial Hermann at UT Houston, and two more years of cardiothoracic surgery training at Banner Health in Arizona. Eight years of training after medical school. Three states. One H-1B visa.

What pulled her toward transplant in particular was something she noticed early in her hospital rotations.

“It always blew my mind that someone can give you the one missing piece in your body. It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. It just fits in. And you’re back to normal. The machine is back running,” she says. “And that there are people who are willing to do that – it’s like the ultimate form of altruism in giving. People voluntarily helping others, from pure good, not expecting anything in return.”

In Jordan, where there is no system for deceased donation and no way for a person who has died to give the gift of a heart, lungs, or pancreas, that altruism is largely invisible. It happens between siblings, between parents and children, and between spouses, in the form of living kidney and partial liver donations. Heart and lung transplants, for the most part, simply do not happen there. When she learned that other countries had built entire infrastructures around recovering organs after death, she was hooked.

A village called the operating room

Heart transplant surgeon sitting on a stool in the opreating room

Dr. Al Rameni has performed 35 heart transplants and reviews donor offers almost every day. These are difficult, time-pressured decisions about whether a heart hundreds of miles away is the right match for a Hartford patient.

She calls the operating room “the healing temple.” She means it.

“It is a healing temple. It’s sacred. People trust us with their bodies and their lives,” she says. “Nobody is excited to have heart surgery.”

Sometimes patients are very emotional in the moments before anesthesia. Sometimes she holds their hand.

“Some of them, when they wake up days later or sometimes months later, and remind me, ‘you held my hand,’ that means so much to me. People are so vulnerable in heart surgery.”

What the public sees on television, the lone surgeon with steady hands delivering a dramatic monologue, is not entirely accurate.

“I take some credit, but I’m definitely not the only one,” she says. “The anesthesiologist is there, the physician assistant who helps me, the scrub tech who hands me the instruments. Sometimes I just put my hand out and they give me what I want without me even saying it. The circulator is running around getting supplies. The perfusionist is there. It’s like playing a symphony. We all have to work simultaneously, and there has to be a rhythm. The piano cannot stop to wait for the violin.”

She is direct about something patients do not always realize. The perfusionist who runs the heart-lung machine is the reason any of this is possible.

“Before the invention of the heart-lung machine, heart surgery was not possible. They thought you could never touch the heart. Discovering heart surgery was recent, in the last 100 years.”

Every time she lifts a heart out of a chest, she says, the awe is the same.

“Every time, I’m mind-blown. It never gets old to me.”

Five members of a transplant team in the operating room

The organ donation myths Dr. Al Rameni wants every Connecticut family to stop believing

This is the part of the conversation she most wanted to have. She has watched a growing wave of social media content claiming that organ donation is dangerous, predatory, or done against patients’ will. She wants Connecticut residents to hear what is actually true.

Myth 1: “If I’m a registered organ donor, the hospital won’t try as hard to save me.”

“We would never take organs from living people,” she says. “We would never take them against your will. The conversation only happens when things are terminal and there’s no hope.”

In modern transplant medicine, the team treating a patient is completely separate from the team that recovers organs. They work independently to avoid bias.

“The teams are completely separate from the procurement team. This process is highly regulated.

Myth 2: “A doctor will declare me dead too quickly.”

Brain death is a precise medical diagnosis. It is not a casual decision.

“When you have a devastating neurological injury that’s irreversible,” she says, only then does donation become a possibility. “There’s no motive and no incentive besides helping people.”

Myth 3: “Most donor hearts come from car accidents.”

Many people assume this. It is not true.

“A lot of donors are young people who died of drug overdose, strokes, or sudden brain aneurysms,” she explains. Their organs are often in excellent condition. Their families, in moments of profound grief, choose to help others.

Myth 4: “It’s against my religion to donate my organs.”

“It’s not really in religion,” she says. “If anything, religion encourages people to help others.”

What she has found instead is a cultural misunderstanding that continues to persist.

Myth 5: “Cases like the one in Kentucky show the system is broken.”

She does not dismiss concerning stories, but she adds perspective.

“In any industry, there will always be rare mistakes. But the system overall is as fair as it can be. It gives people equal opportunity to receive organs. It takes a village to make one transplant work,” she adds. “There is a very strong infrastructure here, and I would never take it for granted.”

A first for Connecticut, and a “perfect heart”

six members of a heart transplant team in the operating room waiting to begin surgery

Dr. Al Rameni has been at the center of two major milestones at Hartford Hospital. In December 2024, her team performed the first beating-heart transplant in Connecticut. The heart remains perfused and gently beating during transport, which improves outcomes. The procedure is more complex because the heart is moving during implantation. The 62-year-old patient left the hospital just six days later. Months later, she transplanted what she described as a “perfect heart” into another patient.

“It looked amazing as it started beating on its own.”

Hartford Hospital has performed roughly 500 heart transplants over 35 years. Dr. Al Rameni has contributed to about 35 of them.

The all-female OR

Patients are sometimes surprised when they meet her. “How old are you? How many of these have you done?” they ask. She no longer takes it personally. “Once everything goes well, they’re so apologetic. I tell them, no, it’s you who did great.”

Five female physicians in scrubs in a heart transplant operating room

A photo hangs on her office door. It shows an all-female transplant team.

“It’s all female very often,” she says. “It’s all young women, competent and confident. We wanted to celebrate it.”

What she hopes you will do

At the end of our conversation, we asked Dr. Al Rameni what message she would share with the public.

“I would really like to fight the misconceptions about organ donation,” she says. “It’s a highly regulated process. Your legacy lives on if you help others. We would never take organs from living people. We would never take them against your will or the will of your family. The conversation about organ donation only happens when there is no hope of survival.”

“A lot of recipients just need this one piece to go in, and they’re back to their normal life. I would highly encourage people to consider being organ donors. You can help so many people. It is the ultimate form of altruism.”

Female heart transplant surgeon posing with her male patient who received a new heart

Register today at donatelifect.org

If Dr. Al Rameni’s story has moved you, take ninety seconds. Visit donatelifect.org/be-a-donor and register. It costs nothing. It does not affect your medical care. An open-casket funeral is still possible. There is no cost to your family. One donor can save up to eight lives and improve many more. Talk to your family. Let them know your decision.

Because in that quiet moment in the operating room, the empty space waiting to be filled is waiting on you.

Donate Life Connecticut is an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) dedicated to increasing awareness of organ, eye, and tissue donation across the state. If you have a story to share, visit donatelifect.org.

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ORGAN RECIPIENT STORIES · DONATE LIFE CONNECTICUT

Twice Saved:

Melissa Reynolds’ Extraordinary Journey Through Two Organ Transplants

Every organ donor makes a choice that echoes long after they’re gone. For Melissa Reynolds, two such choices — made by two strangers — kept her here to do the work she was born to do.

On the evening of October 9, 2024, Melissa Reynolds walked into Hartford Hospital not knowing she would not walk out again for four months.

She hadn’t planned to be admitted. She had gone from her endocrinologist’s office directly to the emergency department at her doctor’s insistence, bags unpacked, husband by her side, her mother meeting them there. Melissa, a recreational therapist at the Institute of Living since 2007 — one of Connecticut’s premier psychiatric care facilities — had spent years caring for some of the state’s most vulnerable people. She knew how hospitals worked. She didn’t think she was that sick.

She was wrong.

What followed was one of the most remarkable — and harrowing — journeys of survival that Donate Life Connecticut has ever had the privilege of hearing. It is a story about the fragility of life and the stunning resilience of the human spirit. It is a story about the extraordinary generosity of organ donors and the ripple effect of their gift. And it is a story about a woman who, even at her sickest, was already thinking about how she would give back.

A Health History She Couldn’t Outrun

Melissa had always known her immune system was compromised. She had fatty liver disease and a cluster of autoimmune conditions that made her body work harder than most just to get through the day. Working in a residential psychiatric program since the height of the pandemic in 2020, she had been exposed to illness repeatedly — and had come through it each time.

In June of 2024, she caught COVID again. It wasn’t the first time, and initially, it didn’t seem like the last. But this time, she didn’t fully bounce back. She pushed through — traveling internationally, working, living — even as her body was quietly losing a battle she didn’t know she was fighting.

“I was tired. I knew I was sick, but since COVID in 2020, I was always kind of sick. It was hard to know when things had really changed.”

By the time her endocrinologist examined her in early October, he couldn’t send her home. He triaged her directly to Hartford Hospital.

Into the ICU

The emergency department at Hartford Hospital was crowded the night Melissa arrived. She waited hours. When she was finally admitted, she had no idea how long she would be there. Her MELD score — a measurement of liver disease severity used to prioritize transplant candidates — was critically high.

Over the weeks that followed, Melissa was transferred between floors multiple times. Codes were called. She was moved to a cardiac unit. She experienced what clinicians call ICU delirium — a state of profound disorientation brought on by critical illness, sedation, and the relentless sensory disruption of intensive care. For Melissa, it was severe. The boundary between what was real and what wasn’t collapsed entirely.

“I thought I was dead. I saw a lot of themes around death. And there was always some truth to what I was seeing — I was dying. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

She would look over from her bed, confused, not knowing where she was or what day it was, and find a nurse standing there, smiling. “I got you. I got you.” It was a face she came to anchor herself to — a steady, human presence in the chaos. When the delirium finally lifted, she looked at that same nurse and thought: “Oh my God. You’re real.”

“I think what they say is true,” she reflects. “You don’t always remember what people did, but you always remember how they made you feel.”

Melissa spent at least six weeks — by some accounts, eight — in the ICU. Her coworkers at the Institute of Living didn’t know if she was coming back. Her family gathered. They had the kinds of conversations families have when hope is uncertain, and decisions are urgent. The news was that heavy.

The Call That Changed Everything

Two days after Thanksgiving 2024, a doctor came to Melissa’s bedside and told her they had found a liver.

She doesn’t remember every word of that conversation. She was still fragile, still in and out of clarity. But she remembers the essential facts: the donor was a woman in her late 30s who had died, the doctor believed, in a car accident. Young. Someone with a whole life ahead of her.

“I wish I could have remembered more from when he told me. But I was just so focused on what was happening next.”

What happened next was a full liver transplant performed overnight by Dr. Serrano and Dr. Emanuel. Because it was a holiday weekend, both surgeons worked through the night together. By Sunday morning, Melissa’s husband received a call. The surgery had gone well.

She came off the ventilator on Tuesday. Physical therapy began on Friday.

November 30, 2024. That date is now etched into Melissa Reynolds’ life the way birthdays are — because in every meaningful sense, it was one.

A Long Way Home

Recovery in the ICU and rehabilitation unit was not linear. Melissa went back and forth between care floors, navigated setback after setback, and slowly, painstakingly, began to rebuild what her body had lost. She relearned how to stand. She worked with physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech therapists. She continued dialysis three times a week, because the liver transplant had left her kidneys under severe strain.

She remembers a moment with her physical therapy team that she still talks about. She was frustrated. Her body wasn’t doing what she told it to. She couldn’t understand why something so simple felt impossible.

“They got down to my level and said, ‘You just had a liver transplant. You are so strong.’ And that was almost what I needed to keep going.”

A doctor on the rehabilitation unit told her she was one of the most motivated patients they had ever had. Melissa’s response has stayed with everyone who heard it:

“I have to be — and I have to stay positive — because I can’t even figure out how to get up or stand up. I have to get out of this hospital. I have a life left to live. I have to get back to work someday.”

That drive — paired with the daily encouragement of the nurses, therapists, dietary aides, and every staff member who walked through her door — is what she credits with pulling her through. “I am so thankful for the staff who kept me going every day and helped me to stay positive and focused,” she says. “Without them, I don’t think I could have done it.”

There were hard moments, too. One of them came when a doctor quietly told her that she would not be going home for Christmas. Melissa processed that one alone. She didn’t tell her family right away. She sat with it.

“I thought, you know what — get through it. This sucks. But get through it.”

She did. She was discharged on February 12, 2025, after 126 days in the hospital. When the elevator doors opened in the lobby, she was sitting in a wheelchair. Waiting for her — having stood in that lobby for nearly an hour — were her supervisor, a coworker, and four of her psychiatric clients, holding welcome home signs they had made themselves.

“I just started crying. The nurse was telling me I had to get in the car because it was freezing. But I couldn’t move. These are people I care for. And they came to wait for me.”

Finding a New Normal

Melissa started outpatient dialysis the very next day. Her schedule was three sessions a week. Doctors’ appointments filled the gaps. Home therapy continued. She leaned into music — always a coping skill, now a daily anchor — and into reading, which she had always loved but never made enough time for. She allowed herself, for the first time, the gift of stillness.

She also set a goal: she was going back to work.

On August 27, 2025, Melissa returned to the Institute of Living — 20 hours a week, working her schedule around dialysis days. The staff and clients who had once quietly prepared themselves for her absence watched her come through the door.

“People didn’t think I was going to make it. A lot of people had come to say goodbye. My coworkers had to grieve me at one point. And then I just walked back in.”

That same fall, in September 2025, Melissa attended the Donate Life Connecticut Gala — a celebration of the lives that organ donation touches. What most people in that room didn’t know was that she was desperately ill that night. She had been on dialysis earlier that day. She was nauseated throughout the event. She had been sick in the parking lot on the way in.

She stayed until the end.

That night, a woman named Danielle quietly followed her out and asked if she was okay. Danielle had walked her own transplant journey and recognized the signs. In that moment, a friendship was born — the kind that only forms between people who understand each other without explanation.

The Second Gift

By the fall of 2025, Melissa was on the kidney transplant list. After a liver transplant, recipients are given priority consideration for a kidney if one is needed within a certain timeframe — an acknowledgment of the physical toll the first surgery takes on the body’s other organs. Melissa was eager. She pushed her care team. “Can we do April? Let’s go. Let’s get this done.”

It doesn’t work like that. She knew that, too.

The night before Thanksgiving, she was at home with her family, laughing about food. She had missed every holiday the year before and was talking about how much she couldn’t wait to eat. She had all but given up on the kidney coming before the new year.

At 6:30 the next morning, her phone rang. She had one hour.

“I went around like a little kid on Christmas. I woke up my parents. I woke up my husband. I said, I’m getting a kidney!”

The surgery was on November 17, 2025. Her second deceased donor — this time, a man. She went in on a Monday. She was discharged on Friday.

Four days, compared to four months.

“The first time around was my whole journey. The kidney was a much different experience.”

Why She Tells Her Story

When Donate Life Connecticut asked Melissa what she hoped people would take from hearing her story, she didn’t hesitate.

“I want to bring awareness to organ donation. But I also want to acknowledge the care that hospital staff gives every single day — because without the people inside those walls, I don’t think I would be here. I had incredible support on the outside. But the people who were with me 24 hours a day, who showed up every shift, who encouraged me and made me laugh and pushed me — they saved my life, too.”

Melissa had registered as an organ donor at sixteen years old. She didn’t know anyone who had received a transplant. She had never thought deeply about what it meant. When she was asked at the DMV, her instinct was simply: if something happened to me, why wouldn’t I?

“To me, it was just being a human.”

Now she is on the other side of that question — twice over. Two people she will never meet made decisions that kept her alive. She plans to write to both of their families when she’s ready. She has been gathering the courage for it, the way you gather yourself before something that matters deeply.

In the meantime, she is giving back in every way she can. She is volunteering with Donate Life Connecticut events. She has signed up for the walk. She is working toward the Dragon Boat race. And she is returning to the Institute of Living — full time now — to the clients and colleagues who once said goodbye and then watched, astonished, as she walked back through the door.

The Full Circle

Donate Life Connecticut’s Marketing Director, Barb Doyle, spent the first chapter of her career as an occupational therapist working in psychiatric rehabilitation. She knows the Institute of Living. She knows the particular kind of person it takes to do that work — the patience, the empathy, the humanistic commitment to showing up for people whose struggles are invisible to the outside world.

When she heard Melissa’s story, she said what everyone in the room was feeling:

“Through the gift of these two people who gave their organs when they could no longer take them with them, they have kept you serving the people who so desperately need you. That is a full-circle moment.”

Melissa Reynolds is a recreational therapist, a transplant recipient, a survivor, and now a voice for organ donation in Connecticut. She is proof that one decision, made by a stranger at a DMV counter, made by a family in the worst moment of their lives, can preserve something irreplaceable in this world.

You Can Make the Same Choice

Melissa’s donors registered their decision before they ever needed to. That’s how it works. You don’t know when the moment will come — for you, or for someone waiting for the call that changes everything.

If you haven’t registered as an organ, eye, and tissue donor, you can do so today at registerme.org. It takes less than two minutes.

And if Melissa’s story moved you, stay with us. This blog is just beginning. We’ll be sharing the stories of organ recipients, living donors, and donor families across Connecticut. Because every one of these stories is proof of what is possible when we choose to give.

Donate Life Connecticut is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of organ, eye, and tissue donation throughout Connecticut.

Do you have a story to share? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us here.