Girl, 13, has heart attacks in France

If cats have nine lives, 13-year-old Katarina — aka Kat — Hartzer has five left.

Katarina had her heart shocked back to life four times last summer in a hospital an ocean away.

She suffered two heart attacks while visiting the French Riviera with a school group. Then she was flown to Denver in an air ambulance while attached to a heart pump — the first time in history a child has flown internationally with such a device.

Today, she’s back in her Rockrimmon home — teasing her two sisters, painting her toenails and fingernails blue, attending classes at Eagleview Middle School and listening to Kanye West.

With a 12-inch scar on her chest and a new heart beating underneath.

It’s an amazing journey that reminds Katarina’s parents, Phil and Lorretta Hartzer, to enjoy every moment of life.

“I’ve still got my daughter,” Lorretta said. “I live every day to the fullest.”

Emergency in France

Katarina was one of a dozen Eagleview students who traveled to France on the school trip. They arrived July 1 and spent the first two weeks touring the French Riviera, taking French classes every morning and staying with host families at night.

On July 12, Katarina spent her 13th birthday eating triple dark chocolate cake on the beach. She returned to the water two days later for another dip in the Mediterranean Sea.

But this time, Katarina, who loves to swim, suddenly felt dizzy and started vomiting. Her friend Kayla brought her to shore on a boogie board, encouraging her with jokes.

“The fish have enough food to eat now,” Kayla told Katarina before running to the lifeguard for help.

Katarina was fading. She heard Kayla shouting, “Kat, stay awake!”

“And then next thing I know, I was in a hospital,” Katarina said.

Katarina, with no pain in her chest and no previous health problems, was having a heart attack.

Back in Colorado Springs, Phil and Lorretta got a call at 7:30 a.m. It was Katarina’s French teacher, telling them their daughter was sick and asking if she had any allergies.

Several hours later, the teacher called again: They needed to fly to France right away. Their daughter had suffered a heart attack and might not live.

The Hartzers got emergency passports and arrived in France on July 16. By then, Katarina had been transferred to Timone Hospital in Marseilles because it had one of France’s two pediatric cardiology units.

Doctors told the Hartzers their daughter had myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. They attached her to a type of heart-lung machine known as an ECMO, for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The machine put oxygen into Katarina’s blood.

It was hard for Phil and Lorretta to see their daughter attached to tubes and machines, in a drug-induced coma.

But Lorretta knew her daughter.

“She’s stubborn. She’ll make it,” Lorretta said.

Radical treatment

The ECMO, however, wasn’t helping. Doctors tried to remove Katarina from the machine 10 days after her heart attack, but her blood pressure plummeted, forcing them to re-attach the machine.

“They just were not seeing any improvement,” Phil said.

Doctors decided to attach Katrina to the EXCOR, a ventricular assist device made by Berlin Heart of Germany that would help her heart pump blood throughout her body.

Katarina had been in a drug-induced coma for much of her time in the hospital. After the EXCOR went in, she woke up for good.

She discovered, on the left side of her body, a small device connected to a tube filled with red liquid: her own blood.

“Creeped me out the first time I saw it,” Katarina said. “I don’t like looking at it.”

For the next few weeks, Katarina passed the time in her hospital room watching movies.

But the family wanted to get back to the United States. An unlikely connection between Marseilles and Denver would make it happen.

Journey home

At Children’s Hospital in Denver, Dr. Francois Lacour-Gayet had learned about Katarina’s case.

Lacour-Gayet, chairman of the Children’s Hospital pediatric surgery department, happened to be good friends with the cardiac surgeons in Marseilles. He knew that if the teen needed a heart transplant, French insurance wouldn’t cover it.

But the Hartzers’ insurance in the U.S., United Insurance, would.

Working with the insurance company, the Marseilles hospital and Berlin Heart, Lacour-Gayet and his colleagues arranged an air ambulance to bring Katarina to Children’s Hospital.

“We put together an international team with one Berlin Heart engineer, one Berlin Heart surgeon, three intensive care nurses from our cardiac ICU and one doctor intensivist from Marseille,” Lacour-Gayet said in an e-mail to The Gazette. “A jet plane was leased and flew to Marseilles.”

A commercial airline was out of the question.

“If anything had happened on a commercial flight, we would never have had the resources to take care of her,” said Bob Kroslowitz, Berlin Heart’s director of clinical affairs for North America.

Katarina and her parents landed at the Centennial airport on Aug. 24.

Then came weeks of heart tests and, finally, the bad news: Eighty percent of Katarina’s heart was damaged and couldn’t be repaired.

It was a rare birth defect. One of Katarina’s heart valves was a half-inch away from where it should have been.

The family had never suspected a problem.

“She was healthy. She never had a cold in her life,” Lorretta said.

On Oct. 13, the Hartzers learned that Katarina would need a heart transplant.

New heart

A donor became available faster than the family expected, and on Oct. 22, Katarina went into surgery and received her new heart.

A newly implanted heart usually takes a few electric shocks to get going, but not Katarina’s.

“It just started beating on its own,” Lorretta said.

Katarina woke up from surgery and asked for lobster.

The teen spent seven more days at the hospital before moving to the Ronald McDonald house nearby with Lorretta. She stayed there for about three more months to be close to the hospital, then finally returned to Colorado Springs on Jan. 22 to be with her sisters, 11-year-old Shelby and 7-year-old Megan.

The family is settling into a routine again.

“It’s a new normal,” Phil said.

Loretta has returned to work as a part-time playground monitor for Academy School District 20, a job that lets her take care of her two youngest girls after school.

And Katarina?

She went back to school a couple of weeks ago — half-days at first, but she wants to get back to full days soon. She loves jumping on the backyard trampoline and obsesses over her cell phone.

Still, every day she takes anti-rejection pills, and she’ll be taking them for the rest of her life. Certain medications must always be taken between 7:55 and 8:05 a.m. every day.

“And they taste really, really bad,” Katarina said.

She has the EXCOR in a box in her closet. She doesn’t plan to look at it anytime soon.

Her parents see life differently now. Phil used to work 60 hours a week at his job at Verizon. Now he works 40 hours a week because his girls are more important, he said.

Lorretta admits it’s scary. She prays for Katarina every night. And when she hears her daughter’s voice in the morning, she can breathe. Relax.

Insurance has covered most of the expenses so far, but they still haven’t gotten the bill from France.

Katarina, the center of all this attention, doesn’t seem to let it bother her.

“I’m a very normal teenager,” Katarina said.

TO HELP

Donate to the Katarina Hartzer Medical Fund at any branch of American National Bank.