At first, when Linda qualified for the heart transplant waiting list, she never wandered far from a phone, expecting a call any day telling her to get to the hospital quick. The 52-year-old chemical engineer, who lives in Oakland, California, was told that the typical waiting time was six to 24 months, and not to travel farther than four hours’ driving distance from the Stanford Hospital operating room — the clock starts ticking as soon as a donor heart is found.

That was over a year and a half ago, just after her cardiologist had diagnosed right-side heart failure. He had pointed out on her echocardiogram how the blood streamed straight through the right side of the heart without the valve even pumping, “just like it was an open pipe.” Diagnosed almost 20 years ago with right ventricular dysplasia, a rare genetic disease that causes dangerous heart rhythm abnormalities, she has been living with a surgically implanted device that jolts her heart back into a normal beat — on occasion knocking her to the ground to keep her alive. Finally at 50, her cardiologist said the disorder had greatly enlarged her heart, and she was running out of time.

Read more about her story at Stanford Medicine.