Just three days after she was born, nineteen-year-old Amy Overton was diagnosed with Complex Congenital Heart with Hypoplastic Left Heart and four other heart defects. Amy survived several more surgeries over the years but was quite limited as a teenager. “ I couldn’t work and I couldn’t start college yet or anything like that. I just really went through a very emotional time and depression and everything, and I didn’t ever think that I would ever get a heart.” Amy states.
Music had always been a big part of Amy’s life and she wrote about her helpless feelings in a song. “Help Me – it was a song I had written when I had MRSA. When I got home in October, that’s when I got the news, I needed a transplant. So it was hard - really hard.”
But a heart did become available for Amy and on November 26th, 2008, she received a transplant. Afterwards, she and her mom came to stay at the Ronald McDonald House while Amy underwent therapy. “It’s great. It’s awesome. It’s a lot better than staying at a hotel or driving back and forth.”
Plagued with chest pain all of her young life, after the transplant Amy, for the first time, was introduced to how other parts of her body actually worked. It’s changed my life in so many ways. "Your heart is just your heart, and how your legs can just hurt and nothing else hurts or is affected by it; it’s just – I mean – that amazed me because I never felt that before. It’s like a car and then you have to re-learn everything.”
During her stay at the house, Amy looked forward to her weekly music therapy with Jenny and the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. “Music therapy is so much fun. It was awesome to meet Jenny because she helped me to really relax my mind and stuff and learn how to write songs better.”
Most who come to the Ronald McDonald House seem to find a special friend - so did Amy. “We stay right down the hall from a friend I met here – his name is Justin and he’s 15. He was a couple of days behind me in his transplant and everything. He’s my little brother now and so having him here and helping him – he needed motivation - and me being able to motivate him strengthened me a whole lot. Just by meeting him.”
Amy feels that the house really does help bring families together. “I would definitely recommend the Ronald McDonald House. I know it’s been a good thing on my mom – I mean just to meet other people and be able to talk to adults and stuff and hearing their side of the story. We’re our own little family – we’re - we make a family together. It’s very comforting to pull up somewhere and know that you’re home. It is home away from home.”
