14 DAY TRIAL // In 2009, Ally Smith became the “Bionic Bride,” as a groundbreaking machine replaced her heart and allowed her to marry her college sweetheart, just months before doctors told her she’d die. Now, Ally has had a heart transplant and is finally “normal.”
Doctors gave Ally almost half a year to live, saying there was nothing they could do anymore for her severely deteriorating heart condition, viral cardiomyopathy.
Eventually, she agreed to have surgery and have a heart pump placed in her chest, to replace her real heart. She seemed perfectly fine.
She even got her dream wedding and returned on Matt Lauer’s Today couch to talk about it, as the video below will show.
In January this year, the pump stopped functioning and Ally slipped into a coma from which, doctors believed, only a miracle could still wake her.
That same day that she was rushed to the hospital, a heart became available for transplant, transforming Ally from “Bionic Bride” into a “Miracle Bride.”
“She’s already normal, Matt. She can do anything you can do,” her cardiologist Dr. Bogaev tells Lauer.
Ally too is glowing: after years of suffering, she is finally able to enjoy life like a normal person – and she’s not planning on waiting to do just that.
“I think I push things farther that most people probably would, just knowing that life can be too short. I might as well do the things I never thought I would be able to do,” she tells Lauer.
As for whether she’d want to meet the family of the person whose heart she now has, Ally says there’s nothing more she’d love.
“Of course, we don’t know each other yet, but I want to tell them that their family member is still here. They’re allowing me to do the things I wasn’t able to do,” she says.