Riley Children’s Foundation has announced Noblesville resident Hannah Ginther, a heart transplant recipient, as a 2026 Riley Champion.
Each year, patients and families are selected for the honor by Riley Children’s Foundation. Riley Champions get the chance to share their personal experiences at events and serve as advocates for the hospital.
“I am honored to show my love for Riley and to share my story,” Hannah said.
Hannah, 11, has been navigating medical obstacles all her life. She was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a rare congenital heart defect where the left side of the heart is severely underdeveloped, making it unable to pump enough blood to the body.
“Her first open-heart surgery came when she was 10 days old,” Kevin Ginther, Hannah’s father, said. “Her second was at 8 months and her third came when she was about a year-and-a-half old. Those three surgeries converted her four-chamber heart into what is essentially a two-chamber heart, where the right part of her heart becomes the main pumping chamber.”
By age 3, Hannah developed pulmonary vein stenosis in her left lung, a condition where veins carrying blood from the lungs to the heart narrow or become blocked. The lung issues became too much for her heart, and she began to go into heart failure. She spent 52 days on a transplant list before receiving her new heart.
Following the transplant, Ginther spent several months at Riley on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a life-support treatment that uses an external artificial heart-lung machine to oxygenate a patient’s blood when they’re dealing with high pulmonary pressure.
“She was there for three months because of the high pulmonary pressures that she had,” said Trinity Ginther, Hannah’s mother. “After that, I think she was really only in the hospital three times that year, which for us was amazing. Once she turned 5, we were able to be home with our other kids and do normal life things. I just wanted to be home and clean my house and do dishes and cook dinner. For a long time, we couldn’t even do those normal things.”
Today, Ginther enjoys playing sports, learning about makeup and spending time with her family.
“It’s because of her donor and Riley team that she is able to do those things — we don’t take them for granted at all,” Trinity said.
