I SURVIVED

HEART FAILURE. RECTAL CANCER. BRAIN BLEEDS. EACH OF THE PEOPLE ON THE FOLLOWING PAGES MIGHT NOT BE ALIVE TODAY WITHOUT A KEY MEDICAL INNOVATION THAT TOOK MANY YEARS, MILLIONS OF DOLLARS, AND COUNTLESS SETBACKS AND BREAKTHROUGHS TO GET QUITE RIGHT. WHO ARE THE NEXT PEOPLE TO BE SAVED?

- JULIE STEWART

I SURVIVED: A RAPIDLY FAILING HEART

MY LIFESAVER: A TITANIUM TICKER

DONAVON HARBISON, A 35-year-old former collegiate offensive lineman, looked like a hearty, healthy guy.

He was crushing it as a dad and educational consultant in Graham, North Carolina... until almost two years ago, when he started coughing a lot and having trouble breathing and took himself to the hospital, suspecting pneumonia. When doctors did a chest X-ray and compared it to an old scan in his file, they saw that Harbison's heart had ballooned in size—a sign of severe heart failure.

Further testing confirmed that his heart was failing fast. His ejection fraction, a measure of how well the heart pumps blood to the body, was 15 percent. It should have been at least 55. Without a transplant or a lifesaving machine that pumps blood, he would be dead in weeks. Doctors filled him with meds and did more tests to get to the bottom of what was going on. For weeks, they were stumped—until they learned that Harbison's father, paternal uncles, and paternal grandmother had all died suddenly before age 50. "I didn't know how they died," he says. "I just knew they died, and nobody really talked about it." It was the clue doctors needed to do genetic testing. It showed that Harbison carried a rare, dangerous variant of TTN, a gene that makes proteins in heart cells. TTN mutations can alter these proteins in a way that weakens the heart and can cause sudden death by someone's mid-40s.