Madison resident Darcy Franicola regularly volunteers to help the Madison Volunteer Fire Company. She keeps active with her church, tends her garden and was able to go on vacation to Myrtle Beach in 2021.

She’s been able to stay busy, stay involved, give back to her community — and stay alive — thanks to a heart transplant she received in 2019 at UPMC Presbyterian hospital, following several years of heart issues, including arrhythmia.

Darcy, 54, was one of the first heart recipients in Southwestern Pennsylvania to accept an organ from a donor who had Hepatitis C. A regimen of antiviral medications she was prescribed after the surgery ensured she would not develop Hepatitis C.

Franicola was honored at a flag-raising ceremony at Independence Health System Latrobe Hospital on Friday as part of National Donate Life Month. Representatives from Independence and the Center For Organ Recovery & Education (CORE) spoke about the importance of signing up as an organ donor. Darcy and her sister, Carey, who works as a social worker at Latrobe Hospital, talked about their experience.

“It still just amazes me,” Darcy said. “Please get out there and educate yourself and become an organ donor, or a blood donor.”

Hepatitis C hearts

Transplants from donors with Hepatitis C have been possible for a little more than a decade, according to Laura Cwynar, organ recovery manager with CORE.

“It does have to be approved by the recipient to receive that type of an organ. But with the development of hepatitis oral medications, what can happen is that a patient who does not have hepatitis can accept a hepatitis organ,” Cwynar said.

If that patient is treated preventively with medication for several weeks, the medicine fights against any possibility of contracting the disease, she said. Aside from coming from a donor who had hepatitis, it is still just as much of a functioning organ.

“It’s been more prevalent of a practice ever since the medications were available to the healthcare community,” she said. “That’s for all organs, too, that it can be made possible — livers, kidneys, lungs.”

Darcy’s choice to accept a Hepatitis C heart was inspired by seeing the story of another Hepatitis-C organ recipient, Jerome Eidemiller, air on TV in June 2019.

Eidemiller was UPMC’s first Hepatitis C heart transplant recipient, and he had received his new heart just two weeks after he had agreed to accept a Hepatitis C heart.

He and his family lived on a farm in Oil City, and aspects of his farm life felt familiar to Darcy, who also grew up in a farm family. It felt like a sign.

“She thought it was divine intervention from my mom, who we had lost a few years older,” Carey Franicola said. “That she was telling her, ‘take the leap of faith — trust science, trust research.’”

Like Eidemiller, Darcy was able to receive her heart transplant very quickly — two weeks after she signed to accept. She even got to meet Eidemiller later, when the two ran into each other at a doctor’s appointment.

The availability of Hepatitis C hearts helps shrink the number of deaths on the organ transplant waitlist, Cwynar said. According to CORE, around 7,000 people are currently awaiting an organ transplant in Pennsylvania.

“We still have people die every day waiting — about 18 nationally — for transplants,” she said.

Life after the transplant

A year after the transplant, the Franicolas reached out to the family of Darcy’s donor, but the family did not wish to talk to them, Carey said, and they are respecting the family’s wishes. They don’t know much about the donor other than that she was a young woman of Darcy’s stature.

“We will always be appreciative and grateful for her donor and her family,” Carey said. “In the past five years, there has not been a day that Darcy has not thought about her donor and their family.”

Dr. Daniel Medic, a retired doctor who was Darcy’s primary care provider, was emotional at the event Friday to see his patient thriving years after her transplant.

“You just go through the routine and do the tests, and you never expect that to happen — being a heart transplant recipient,” Medic said. “I haven’t seen Darcy for a while, so to see her here today is really nice.”

Maryann Singley, chief nursing officer at Latrobe Hospital, said that while Independence does not do organ transplants at its hospitals, the hospital system does coordinate with CORE to recover organs from donors who die at Independence hospitals.

“There is a lot of sadness on one side, but there is a lot of joy on the other. It’s very bittersweet,” Singley said of organ donation. “No one wants to think about being an organ donor. But if you do think about the other side of it, and having a meaningful discussion with your parents, your family and friends, it is really very important.

“So many lives have been saved or enhanced or restarted based on just the selflessness of someone saying ‘I’m going to be an organ donor.’”

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