COURTESY PHOTO Taylor "Tee" Grey Burton, 13, has had two heart transplants and needs a third one. She's with her mother, G'Nell Abracosa.

Heart-wise

A resilient Honolulu-born 13-year-old
girl prepares to have her third
heart transplant

Three different hearts have beaten inside 13-year-old Taylor "Tee" Grey Burton. Now, she's preparing to receive a fourth.

Heart transplants are not rare these days. But two hearts for one person is.

Fund-raisers Family and friends of G'Nell Abracosa and her daughter Taylor "Tee" Grey Burton are organizing various events in Honolulu to raise $150,000 for a third heart transplant for the 13-year-old girl. The first "Have a Heart for Tee" event will be from 5 to 9 p.m. June 8 at Tiki's Grill and Bar. Tickets are $40 per person and include pupus and live entertainment. They can be purchased at Coffee Talk, 3601 Waialae Ave., phone 737-7444, or by e-mailing jkapolol@lava.net and paying at the door the night of the event. Donations may be made payable to "Friends of Taylor Burton" and dropped off at Bank of Hawaii branches or mailed to: Friends of Taylor Burton, 3412 Francis St., Honolulu 96815.

And three heart transplants for someone as young as Honolulu-born Tee is quite uncommon, doctors say.

After receiving a teenager's heart in 2003, when her first heart transplant failed, it didn't take long for Tee's body to reject it as well.

During a biopsy in February, "she was in full rejection," said her mother, G'Nell Abracosa. "Her system was shutting down. When they were putting her under, her heart failed and it took them three times to revive her."

And now, Tee waits for her third transplant.

"The plan is to sustain her heart for six to eight months, as long as we can, to get her healthy and get the antibodies out of her system. At that point, we will get a transplant," Abracosa said.

Despite her trying circumstances, the pain, the medicine and the long hospital stays, you won't find Tee complaining about her ailments, her mother says.

After meeting a 7-year-old girl with cancer, she told her mother, "I'm so lucky I don't have cancer. Those kids have it so hard."

As she waits for a heart transplant, Tee has stayed busy with her studies. And she loves to draw and cook. She recently baked a red velvet cake after seeing it made on the Food Channel.

"I want to give her kudos because she's my daughter," Abracosa said. "But I think most kids, whatever they have to face, makes them fighters and not want to quit. They are people who look forward."

The family now lives in Santa Monica, near Tee's heart specialists at UCLA.

And she's sustained in part by her memories of Hawaii. After her second heart transplant, Tee came to Hawaii on vacation and surfed all week.

"She loves to surf, the ocean and swimming," her mother said.

Abracosa said she tries to keep the teen's life as normal as possible, but it's been a tough year for the sixth-grader. "She was starting middle school and hardly ever in school."

Tee seemed to be a normal kid, keeping up with all the other kids until she started attending preschool.

In 1994, then in San Clemente, Calif., a school nurse noticed during a routine physical that the 2-year-old had an abnormally rapid heart rate.

She was diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardia, and she was treated at Children's Hospital in San Diego. There, doctors used a catheter with an electrode to destroy the cells in the heart producing the repeated fast rhythm, explained Dr. Carlos Moreno, chief of the pediatric cardiac program at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children.

In Tee's case, "the heart is going too fast for a long period of time, which damages the heart to the point where it's irreversible," Moreno said.

By her third procedure, "her heart was beating so much, it gave up," her mom said. She was taken to UCLA for a heart transplant in January 1997, receiving a heart six months later.

"She had a couple bouts of acute rejection where it was a bit of a crisis, but overall I think she did fairly well (after the transplant)," her mother said.

But six years later, doctors found she had coronary artery disease after she passed out twice during school. Unlike adult coronary artery disease, with arteries getting clogged, her mother said Tee's arteries were affected from a combination of medication and rejection of the transplant.

In September 2003, she received the heart of a teenager who died in an accident.

But she didn't feel well most of last year, and was hospitalized in December, Abracosa said. "She was let out the day before Christmas which was great, but something already was going on ... She was horribly sick all of January."

She went to the emergency room twice that month and also had regular visits to the doctors to figure out what was wrong, Abracosa said.

And now, Tee waits. And as always, she remains upbeat, her mother says.