Pulmonary Hypertension Stories: Stacie’s Wish for an All-Terrain Wheelchair

Stacie is a 27-year-old who loves the outdoors. Her journey with pulmonary hypertension began when she was an infant: at just 10 months old, she had double pneumonia. Although she recovered, she became sick again a month later. After visiting an on-call doctor who happened to be a heart specialist, her family discovered that Stacie had been born with a hole in her heart.

MORE: Rebekah’s fight against pulmonary hypertension.

Throughout her early childhood, Stacie had regular operations to keep her heart condition stable. However, when she turned 11 and started secondary school, she realized she could no longer climb the stairs without feeling dizzy and began collapsing at school. She was then diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension.

Due to her declining health, Stacie was put on the transplant list for a double lung and heart transplant in 2012 and had to wait until May 2015 for organs to become available. Sadly, Stacie contracted an infection earlier this year which has caused her body to begin rejecting her lungs and her heart. The doctors are unable to do anything more for her, and she’s been told that she has only one or two years left to live.

Stacie is determined to make the most of the time she has left and as a keen traveler, she’s trying to fit in as much travel as she can, both in the U.K. where she lives and overseas. You can read about her travels with her partner Mark on her blog Life is Worth the Fight.

One of the main setbacks, aside from her health, is her wheelchair. Stacie would like to be able to access places that most wheelchairs can’t get to and is trying to raise money to buy an all-terrain wheelchair that can handle her traveling demands. She has launched a crowd-funding page and is currently about halfway to raising the total of £6,000 she needs to buy the wheelchair.

MORE: How to live your best life with a chronic illness

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