D’Zhana Simmons, a 14-year-old girl from South Carolina, was able to leave the hospital on Wednesday after having had two transplants and survived with artificial heart pumps, but no heart, for four months between the transplants.

Last spring, the girl and her parents learned that she had dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently. On July 2, the girl was scheduled for a heart transplant at Holtz Children’s Hospital in Miami. However, the new heart failed to work properly and was quickly removed two days after.

Given the situation, the doctors in charge with D’Zhana’s case, decided to implant two heart pumps made by Thoratec Corp of Pleasanton, California, to keep the girl’s blood flowing through her body until she could have a second transplant. The procedure was pretty unusual for a young patient, especially that when an artificial heart is used to sustain a patient, the patient’s own heart is usually left in the body.

“This, we believe, is the first pediatric patient who has received such a device in this configuration without the heart, and possibly one of the youngest that has… been bridged to transplantation without her native heart,” Dr. Marco Ricci, the hospital’s director of pediatric cardiac surgery, said.

Asked how she felt about living without a heart, D’Zhana said, “it was like I was a fake person, like I didn’t really exist. I was just here.”

Such artificial hearts have been approved for adult patients because companies don’t invest as much into technology that could help children, because they believe it’s rarer for children to have such life-threatening conditions, Dr. Ricci added.

Between the two transplants, D’Zhana remained hospitalized, as she couldn’t breathe on her own half the time. She also had kidney and liver failure and gastrointestinal bleeding. But things are getting better after the second transplant, as she will be able to do most thing teenagers do, like going to school or going out. She’ll continue to take her anti-rejection drugs and there are chances she’ll need another transplant by the time she reaches 30.