Utah author publishes book inspired by her own experience with heart failure

SARATOGA SPRINGS, Utah (ABC4) — Book lovers, keep an eye out for this new heartwarming story. Coming out in March, Utah author Erin Stewart’s “Every Borrowed Beat” will take you on an exciting and emotional journey that explores what it means to truly live and never take a day for granted.

“Every Borrowed Beat” is Stewart’s third young adult book and is set to release on March 11, with a launch party on March 13 at The Book Box in Draper and a book signing at the Sandy Barnes & Noble on March 15.

The book follows 17-year-old Sydney Wells who receives a heart transplant after waiting for years with heart failure. But, with her new heart comes an onslaught of questions and feelings — such as what’s next for her future that she hadn’t planned? And who was the person who had to lose her life so she could live? Sydney sets out on an adventure trying to get some answers, and along the way, finds a love she hadn’t expected.

“This is a story about grief and loss and letting go. But it’s also a story about love and finding life,” Stewart said. “… It really is a story about how she gets this second chance and what is she going to do with it. How is she going to live her life? Is she going to live her life looking back at the past and being filled with grief and guilt and wonder, or is she going to move forward and let love back into her heart and find that balance and live the life that her donor wanted her to have?”

Stewart said the idea for the book started with her own experience and struggles around heart failure. When she was 25 and her first daughter was born, Stewart said went into heart failure brought on by the rare condition peripartum cardiomyopathy, or heart failure from pregnancy.

“After she was born, I went into heart failure. I was lucky enough to have great doctors up at the U where they treated me … Within about a year, my heart was out of the heart failure range and so I was able to avoid a transplant, but it was a very scary year,” she said.

“I had a newborn baby. My heart was failing. I had trouble breathing. I didn’t have a lot of energy. I was pretty sick for a little while with this newborn baby … I just remember I had to go to a lot of doctor’s appointments during that time, and I was by far the youngest one in the in the heart failure unit,” she said. ” … I felt like it was pretty unfair that I was having this kind of life or death situation as a young 25-year-old mom.”

Stewart shared that through her care, it was explained to her that the heart is all about balance, where there has to be as much blood coming in as going out, and when you’re in heart failure, that balance is thrown off. This explanation she said, seemed to be a lot like life, too.

“What you’re taking in, you can’t just let it fester and hold on. You have to let it go,” she said.

This lesson inspired the premise for her book, which turned into Sydney’s tale.

“That idea started percolating in my mind about what it was like for me to go through heart failure and to kind of be on the cusp of death and to come back. And then in terms of as a teenager, what would it be like to go through that as a teenager and to have to learn that lesson when you’re so young” she said. “Then with the transplant, which I was fortunate not to have to need a transplant, but what would it be like as a teenager when you’re finding out who you are and you have someone else’s heart inside you?”

In her experience, Stewart said she learned a lot about letting go — and realizing things may happen that are beyond your control, but the best choice you can make is to focus on how you respond to it.

“Anyone that’s had an experience that brings them kind of face to face with their mortality, I think you learn that it really is so fragile and it can go so fast. One day you’re you’re pregnant and you’re having your baby and everything’s great. You’re setting up your nursery, and the next day you’re in the hospital in heart failure. Just, things can change so quickly,” she said. “The point of that is not to say, ‘Oh, it’s scary things can change,’ but just live your life because it’s only here for so long. And when it’s gone, it’s gone,” she said.

Stewart said since treatment, she’s been lucky to be able to have and adopt more children, which is something she doesn’t take for granted as it wasn’t always a guarantee.

In addition to tying into her own expereince, Stewart said that for “Every Borrowed Beat,” she met with Utah heart transplant survivors and doctors to learn more about the process of heart transplants to ensure her story was accurate.

“I really want it to feel real and resonate with everyone who’s maybe been through something similar,” she said. “When you have a heart transplant, it’s not just like you go home and you’re done … You’re on tons of medicine for the rest of your life to make sure you don’t reject that organ. You often have to have other transplants subsequently liver, another heart. …  You’re still chronically ill from your heart transplant, and that’s something that I wanted to make sure I represented correctly,” Stewart said.

In the story, Sydney goes on a quest to learn about the person whose heart she now has, dealing with her own complex emotions of grief, as well as loss for the teenage years she had to give up due to her illness.

“There’s a lot of dealing with that kind of grief and loss, and there’s also a lot of guilt by having someone else die and have their heart inside you, keeping you alive when they didn’t get to live,” she said.

Stewart said what she hopes readers get from reading about Sydney’s emotions is an understanding of how to face them. Sydney looks for solace in uncovering the story of the person who gives her a second chance at life — which Stewart said may not be the healthiest start to dealing with her feelings, but she learns a lot of valuable lessons along the way.

“She breaks a lot of rules trying to find out a way to kind of get her guilt and grief to go away and ultimately, I hope what she finds and what a reader would find is that we may not ever get rid of that grief and that may just be part of our story from now on — but that doesn’t mean we can’t move forward,” Stewart said.

She continued: “I think that’s probably the big message is to let go of the things that are burdening us down, but also take some of them, take pieces of them and move forward with them,” she said.

Stewart explained that with her own heart failure experience, she dealt with feelings of anger at first, but now feels she learned so much from it as she moved forward herself.

“There are so many wonderful things that have come into my life because of that heart failure, which sounds kind of weird, but there have been people have come into my life. I’m a lot more empathetic. This story I couldn’t have written without my experience,” she said.

In addition to the emotional aspects the story explores, she hopes it can bring awareness to heart disease.

“It’s the number one killer of women. It’s a big deal. Before I had my experience with heart failure, I did not realize how pervasive heart problems and heart disease are, especially for women … I just think it’s also important that people know this is something that people deal with — heart transplants, heart disease on any level, and it’s really debilitating,” she said.

Learn more about Stewart and follow updates on her books and events through her website and social media pages.