Ella Morrissey: A heart transplant will allow her to attend school in-person at the University of Missouri

“Come on slowpokes!”

There’s no need to run, but senior Ella Morrissey can’t help herself, speeding ahead of her friends on the way to AMC Theater for a friend’s birthday party. They’re used to having to catch up to her now.

Ever since her heart transplant in December, she runs every chance she gets — climbing hills she passes by, chasing her shih tzu poodle in the front yard or tumbling across Loose Park with her friends. 

Before Dec. 5, 2021 — the day of her surgery — Ella couldn’t run at all. She couldn’t see her friends or stay awake for more than a few hours. She struggled to find the energy to go outside.

But after seven years of doctors visits, asking her friends to take a break on every walk and five months in a Memphis hospital bed preparing and recovering from a heart transplant, Ella’s friends are now the ones asking her to slow down. 

Her heart disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, doesn’t restrict her like it used to — and won’t get in the way of her future college experience at the University of Missouri the way it disrupted her senior year.

Ella doesn’t have to worry about her heart malfunctioning or passing out in class anymore. She’s changed since the transplant — her friends and family have noticed. Her face has a healthier glow, she spends more time outside and she’s not taking naps every few hours like she used to.

“I was really nervous about going to college [with] my heart because I feel like there’s a lot of running and partying, and you don’t have your parents with you,” Ella said. “But now I feel like I can relax a bit because nothing will happen with my heart.”

For most students, the monotony of online school ended after the spring of 2021, but Ella has spent the majority of her senior year doing Edgenuity classes from bed. She couldn’t risk illness with a weakened immune system post-surgery — even a common cold would’ve put her in the emergency room. While she can see some of her friends now that she’s back from Memphis, she still can’t be in large crowds, including the halls of East.

Next semester, Ella’s immune system will be strong enough for her to go to class in-person. She can rush a sorority, go to game days and live in a single suite next to two of her current friends and two other students she’s already connected with.

Ella knows she’ll never be completely “back to normal” — her immune system will always cause her to have stronger reactions to sicknesses than her friends — but she’s glad she’s out of the hospital bed. Typically, patients can’t walk for a week after a transplant — she was up by the second day. Her doctors said she was one of their fastest recoverers because of how active she stayed after the surgery.

Now that she’s no longer held back by her condition, Mizzou is a chance for Ella to catch up on finding herself in a new place with the limitations of her condition in the past. Not only did dealing with her heart condition make school impossible, but it also isolated her from self-discovery during a pivotal time in her life — senior year.

“I didn’t really know who I was because, with all these restrictions, I couldn’t really find myself,” Ella said. “Now, I have no restrictions so when I dance, I dance. And whenever I was hanging out with a new group, I was always scared that they were gonna run and I wouldn’t be able to catch up with them and it would be scary to tell them, ‘Oh, I have a heart disease.’ Now, I have no worries about that.”