A woman who was born without a uterus has shared how the UK’s first womb transplant has given her a ‘glimmer of hope’ that she can one day carry her own child.

Hannah Vaughan, who lives in Cheshire, found out that she had Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome when she was 16 — a condition that means she doesn’t have a womb so is unable to become pregnant.

The 24-year-old said the diagnosis left her feeling ‘quite isolated’ and ‘very different’.

However, surgeons in the UK yesterday revealed that they had performed the nation’s first womb transplant in a 34-year-old woman with MRKH.

The social care worker said she is ‘unbelievably happy’ that the groundbreaking procedure went well and that she would ‘not even think twice’ about undergoing the same op.

Miss Vaughan said that receiving her diagnosis of MRKH was ‘a nice feeling at that age because I was still becoming me and have always wanted to have children’.

Miss Vaughan said: ‘Even though I had lots of people around me, I still felt isolated.

‘At that age, I thought I could put it to the back of my mind a little bit because I’m not ready just yet, but at the same time — it still affected me every day and I had counselling at the time.’

The condition affects about one in every 5,000 women.

It means a woman has been born with an underdeveloped womb or without a womb, cervix and upper vagina. Their ovaries and external genitalia appear normal. 

The first sign of MRKH is usually that a girl does not start having periods. Sex may also be difficult because the vagina may be short. 

Until now, the only way sufferers could have a biological child was by taking eggs from their ovaries, fertilising them and implanting them in another woman. But this option isn’t available to all woman with MRKH.

But a 34-year-old with MRKH with this week revealed as the first person in the UK to receive a womb transplant, from her sister, at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, which is part of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. 

Miss Vaughan said news of the transplant was ‘amazing’ to hear as she was told about it early on in her diagnosis, but thought it was ‘unlikely’ to have happened by the time she was ready to start planning to have children.

‘When I found out I had MRKH, I was like that’s not going to be ready when I’m ready’, she said.

‘I’m just so unbelievably happy for that woman — bless her.

‘It just gives you that glimmer of hope that if that opportunity is there and I am able to do that safely and successfully, I would not even think twice about doing that.’

She added that she found solace in the fact that the receiver of the womb transplant also has MRKH and to see that the procedure ‘is going well for her’.

Miss Vaughan has researched the womb transplant procedure, but said she is aware of the potential risks, which include organ rejection, and said she would monitor the outcome of future womb transplants.

Before receiving her new womb, the unidentified recipient had two rounds of fertility stimulation to produce eggs, followed by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to create embryos.

In order to qualify for a womb transplant, Miss Vaughan said: ‘I believe I would need to have frozen my embryos (which I am in the process of doing) and there are lots of health tests in order to progress through the treatment.’

Miss Vaughan and her partner, Luke Seddon-Rimmer, whom she has been with for nearly three years, are in the process of starting their in vitro fertilisation (IVF) journey after initial tests found that she had a ‘quite low ovarian reserve’, which means that she has a lower number of eggs in the ovaries than expected for her age.

She said she would ‘love’ to have a child with Mr Seddon-Rimmer, whom she said reacted to her condition ‘very well’.

‘Having a child of my own and carrying my own child would be the most incredible thing in the whole world for me’, she said.

‘Unless you have MRKH or have an experience with something which may reduce your chances of having your own children, it is hard to understand what it is like.’

A single father from Southern California is feeling like a new person after undergoing a rare and risky triple organ transplant that had him under the knife for 20 hours. 

Valance Sams Sr. received a new heart, liver and kidney at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles during a procedure that only 45 others have had in the last 36 years. 

‘I’m feeling good, great, awesome,’ Sams said. ‘It’s night and day.’

The surgery comes 10 years after Sams was first diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that caused a buildup of scar tissue on his heart. 

Prior to his procedure, the dad was unable to work or walk. Now, he’s back to exercising and walking with his son, who helped nurse him back to health. 

The surgery was possible thanks to a team effort that included doctors from numerous departments at the Los Angeles based hospital. 

At one time, Sams’ primary physicians were working with up to 15 other doctors. 

‘The coordination starts long before we even get to the operating room,’ said Dr. Justin Steggerda, Sams’ kidney surgeon.

The procedure has been a long time coming for Sams who was on a strict medication and treatment plan before his organs began failing earlier this year. 

Sams’ sarcoidosis and its effects on the heart led to other health issues that impacted his kidney and liver.  

‘If the heart’s not working, it can cause something called congestive hepatopathy in the liver, where the liver just starts not to work very well, and can cause chronic and permanent damage of the liver, and then it can also cause stress on the kidneys as well,’ said Irene Kim, director of the Cedars-Sinai transplant center. 

His intense treatment schedule required a full-time caregiver, which became his son Valance ‘Vee’ Sams Jr.  

As a teenager, Vee took on the role of nurse, counting out medications and helping his father prepare meals every day. 

‘I was basically his personal nurse,’ Vee said. 

‘I made sure everything was OK, he wasn’t missing appointments. I made sure his medicines [were] OK, you know, changing his bags for dialysis,’ he said. 

While talking with Cedars-Sinai, Sams got emotional talking about his son’s role in helping to keep him healthy and alive over the years.  

‘Since the beginning, he’s been like my nurse, my best friend, my brother,’ he said.

Earlier this year, Sams got the call that a heart, kidney and liver were all available for him after spending two months in the hospital for his failing organs. 

Doctors quickly got to work procuring the organs and prepping for the rare surgery. 

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, fewer than 50 people have received the same organ transplants since they began tracking in 1987. 

‘Since then, the average has been only about 1.5 of these surgeries per year in the U.S., more frequently within the last five years as providers and surgeons get more comfortable with the operations and technology,’ Gunn said. 

The order of the transplants is decided by how each organ’s ischemic time – the length of how long the organ can survive outside the body. 

The heart has the longest ischemic time, followed by liver, then kidney. 

Now, Sams’ doctors say he has a great chance at full recovery if he follows his medications and treatment plan dutifully. 

The single father is already back to some of his favorite hobbies including coaching youth football. Vee too is back to the things he loves and has enrolled in film school. 

‘The little things are so important,’ Sams said. ‘We take advantage of a lot of little things, but now I know that those little things are where it’s at.’

As reunions go, it perhaps does not get much stranger than to come face to face with your own heart.

Jennifer Sutton, 38, was able to be reunited with her once vital organ as her heart was removed in a transplant operation 16 years ago.

And today she was reunited with the vital organ as it went on permanent display at a central London museum, an experience she described as ‘surreal’.

Jennifer, who was just 22 when she received a new heart, which literally gave her a new lease of life at the Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire.

Describing seeing her heart in a museum display case, she said: ‘It’s extremely surreal to see it. I definitely have a fondness for it, although it caused so much trouble inside me.

‘I’m glad it’s in that jar and I have a new one.

‘I am grateful though as it kept me alive for 22 hears, it’s like an old friend.

‘I think it’s cool. It reminds me of everything I’ve been through and I hope that in time other people will look at it and consider organ donation .

‘I’m incredibly grateful to my donor, I can’t describe how grateful I am and will be forever, and my amazing surgeon’.

Jennifer, from Ringwood, Hampshire, does not know much who her donor except he was a man of 33 called Richard.

The heart can be seen by the public at the museum sited in the Royal College of Surgeons’ building in Holborn, central London, the home of thousands of anatomical exhibits.

The museum was at the centre of some controversy recently after it declined requests to allow the burial of the 7ft7in skeleton of an Irish giant, Charles Byrne, in the museum’s collection, although the skeleton is no longer on public display.

The museum has just undergone a five year, £100million refit.

The success of the operation was all the more poignant as Jennifer’s mother died after a heart transplant when Jennifer was just 13.

Jennifer always assumed there must be something wrong with her heart, but things came to a crisis while at Portsmouth University, studying Animal Science

She said: ‘I always assumed I must have had something wrong because I was slower than other children. At school I struggled at sports.

‘But nothing was done about it until I went to university. I was in my second year when a friend at the time noticed I seemed to be struggling walking up hills, going blue a lot and getting breathless. My face was blue and my lips and fingers were too.’

She went to see a GP who immediately rang 999 and she was taken to hospital with suspected heart failure where she stayed for two weeks.’

She was diagnosed with restrictive cardiomyopathy, a condition where the heart becomes progressively stiffer over time, and struggles to pump blood around the body.

It was the same condition that her mother had.

She was given drug treatment, but went on the list awaiting surgery in 2007 and had a heart transplant in June the same year.

Describing the moment her heart was removed, she said: ‘I woke up and I was pink, my fingers had blood in them, my cheeks were warm and I could feel my heart beating – for the first time in, what seemed like, forever.’

‘I felt amazing, and I woke up and I thought “I’m alive” and I did a little dance.’

The new heart allowed Jennifer to pursue a career as a park ranger in the New Forest, an active career she would never have been able to have had she not had surgery, and pursuing active hobbies. She has proudly hiked up Snowdonia.

And it has allowed her to marry her husband, Tom Evans, a software engineer, in June.

Jennifer did not find the idea of her heart becoming a museum exhibit strange as her father worked as a researcher at the Natural History Museum, and she was happy to consent to it going on display.

The heart is preserved in Kaiserling solution, a mixture of glycerine, sodium acetate and distilled water. 

It appears pale and narrower than a healthy heart, due to the stiffness of the heart muscle. 

Her surgeon, Mr Stephen Large, said: ‘It’s extraordinary to have Jennifer’s heart on display.’ He added that he hoped it would encourage many more people to sign up for organ donation.

He said: ‘The actual issue is not a lack of funds but a lack of donors. It does not just benefit the recipient, but the family who have lost a loved one, and it’s a great comfort for them.’

Currently the wait for a heart transplant on the NHS is between 18 months and two years.