Veronika Stumpo doesn’t shy away from the fragility of life.

She was born with an enlarged heart. She lost her father to complications of the same genetic ailment. And now she’s living with someone else’s heart — a young woman named Nicole — beating inside her.

She lives to build connections — traveling to New York and meeting with Nicole’s family, developing a Reddit community and sharing her transplant story with them, and linking Denver Water customers to the precious resource she cherishes.

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“I was so young, 20, when I had my heart transplant, I want to support organ donations, raise more awareness and foster community among recipients. It’s always nice to meet someone who has been through something similar,” said Stumpo, who has worked at Denver Water as a survey technician since 2022.

Stumpo was born with dilated cardiomyopathy, an enlarged heart that weakens over time.

From her first breath, Stumpo's life was intertwined with tubes and wires, her heart relying on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, more commonly known as ECMO, for support.

A balancing act

But thankfully, those early interventions worked, and Stumpo’s parents carried her from the hospital into a pretty typical childhood, if not for the frequent cardiology visits and medication regimen.   

The delicate balance endured through her childhood and into her teenage years, until she lost her father.

“The stress from his passing kicked my heart into failure. I was only 18.”

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She needed to have surgery to connect her heart to a machine that could help it pump blood throughout her body.

This machine, a Left Ventricular Assist Device, or LVAD, must be connected to external battery packs at all times to function.

“I had to wear my machine and battery packs pretty much all the time. Once I got used to it, I could carry on a pretty normal life despite the odd looks I received every once in a while.”

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She also had to remain extremely vigilant about her LVAD’s battery levels.

“Most people can switch out their batteries without much trouble, but my heart was so weak that whenever my batteries got disconnected, I passed out!”

Stumpo was dependent on the LVAD device for almost a year.

A new heart

“The summer was the worst because I love swimming and you can’t submerge yourself when electronics are keeping you alive, but at least I wasn’t in the hospital.”

In order to get back to swimming, Stumpo needed a new heart that could function without the help of an LVAD machine.  

In 2011, when Stumpo was 20, a heart became available.

“The call came through at around 2 a.m. I woke up the whole house and prepped my machine for the three-hour drive to the hospital.”

“My mom drove as fast as she could with no regard for speed limits. We had to get there quickly, because donor organs do not last very long.” 

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When she arrived at the hospital, she was rushed into what would become a 12-hour surgery.

“Because the surgery is so intense, you have to be under for a long time, and it takes quite a while before you are fully part of the world again.”

It took Stumpo almost a week to become fully lucid post-surgery.

Once she emerged, the real work began. 

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“I had to relearn how to walk, and I was about 30 pounds heavier than normal due to the fluids the doctors pumped into me in order to protect my internal organs.”

However, Stumpo did leave the hospital in time to celebrate Christmas 2011 with her family at home.

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Over the course of the next year, Stumpo found her rhythm, striding back toward normalcy while grappling with profound change.

“The first year is your biggest risk. You are on a huge amount of anti-rejection medications to keep your heart healthy and OK. I had to take 15-20 pills a day.

But she recovered relatively quickly, although she still has to take anti-rejection medications on a daily basis.

Yet, as Stumpo was starting a new life after her heart transplant, she also was trying to start her adult life in general. 

“Most heart transplant recipients are much older than me. In the hospital my nurses used to always call me the baby of the bunch because I was a good 40 years younger than the next youngest person there.”

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In 2017, she followed her drive for independence and moved from her home in Virginia to Denver.

“I had friends out here, and I was ready for a change, ready to get away from the place I grew up.”

When she got to Denver, looking for connections, she started a weekly happy hour through the social networking site Reddit.

Though the group is open to anyone, she saw it as an opportunity to talk about organ donation and raise awareness.

Her name was Nicole

Stumpo also sees connecting with her heart donor’s family as an important part of her early adult and post-transplant life.  

“My donor, her name was Nicole. For privacy reasons her family had to reach out first. When they did, I eagerly arranged a meeting. I flew out to their home in New York to visit them, and we had a wonderful time,” Stumpo said.

“I spent time with her mother and sister. By the end of the trip, they sent me away with armfuls of food to take with me.”

Stumpo honors Nicole by focusing on the future every day, an attitude she carries into her work as a Survey Technician for Denver Water, finding and mapping water pipes, often in older neighborhoods, in the Denver Water system.

“I love that my work at Denver Water lets me feel like I’m connecting others with something that feels so vital and important to me,” Stumpo said.

“I grew up in the beach towns on the edge of the Baltic Sea and swimming in the ocean. Water is my happy place. For me the water is only place that I can actually relax.”