Celebrating life, love, and resilience during Heart Month 2024

There’s a reason hearts have become synonymous with life and love. Crack open a book, walk into a chocolate shop on Valentine’s Day, and notice how hearts are used to depict the very centre of emotion, of human life. We can give our hearts away; we can wear them on our sleeve… but we can’t live without them. At the MUHC foundation, we celebrated heart month by paying tribute to the MUHC’s cardiology experts, who are fighting for every heart.

From growing heart tissue in a petri dish, to finding less-invasive ways to perform life-saving heart surgery, the MUHC’s heart specialists are working around the clock to fix broken hearts, and they couldn’t have done it with you, our generous community of donors. A testament to your commitment to bettering our community, our Dream Big: Fix Broken Hearts campaign has already raised a remarkable $18 million towards this goal.

“From the bottom of my heart, and on behalf of the many patients who have benefited from the incredible care offered at the MUHC, I want to express my profound gratitude to all of the donors who have made all of this a reality,” shares Dr. Renzo Cecere, the MUHC’s Director of Cardiac Surgery.

We know that the situation is dire: heart-related health problems are increasing across Canada, where approximately 2.6 million adults have some form of heart disease. This is why we’re funding innovative heart health research and cutting-edge equipment that enables our specialists to perform less invasive, life-saving surgery. Since you’re helping us do it, we thought it would be nice to share an update on the impact we’re making.

We know that every heart is unique, which is why the MUHC’s experts like Dr. Nadia Giannetti and Dr. Cecere are growing patients’ heart tissue in petri dishes to enable close study and personalized treatment approaches. Called the Heart in a Dish program, this innovative study is blurring the line between science fiction and reality, and signals that the future of medicine is here.

The Fix Broken Hearts campaign specifically funds these innovative projects because they dramatically increase the quality of life for patients with severe heart failure. In many instances, providing patients with another chance at life.

“What I love the most about my job is being able to offer patients not just a life, but a lifetime of wellbeing. For instance, heart transplantation is the gold standard, but the MUHC has access to innovative technology that helps provide a quality of life that patients deserve while they wait for a heart transplant,” says Dr. Cecere.

At the MUHC Foundation, we advocate for every heart, especially the ones who’ve been left behind. This is why we’re funding innovative new projects like Dr. Judy Luu’s POWERHub, Pathways to Cardiovascular care for women in Ethnic, Racialized, and Remote communities, which is making health care more inclusive and revolutionizing heart care for women in Quebec, especially those from underserved communities.

Moreover, the MUHC’s heart specialists aren’t just physicians, they’re also leading scientists, and Nurse-Clinicians with a vision for making heart care more accessible, like Wendy Wray. Wendy is the Nurse Director of the Women’s Healthy Heart Initiative (WHHI), a nurse-led heart disease prevention clinic fully funded by donations to the MUHC Foundation. The project is the first of its kind in Quebec and strives to increase awareness and accessibility to heart care for women in Montreal.

Monique Chalifour, a mother of two young children, went from being healthy and active, to battling heart failure at 37. A few months ago, Monique received a life-saving heart transplant, performed by Dr. Cecere.