Sisters 7 years apart who received heart transplants celebrate Christmas (Exclusive)

Meredith Everhart is celebrating Christmas this year with her family and a new heart. She and her sister, Abby Cannon, are seven years apart and are both 38-year-old heart transplant recipients. This Christmas, they have a newfound appreciation for being together during the holidays.

“I'm so grateful to be alive,” said Everhart, a 39-year-old social worker. “I just want to give, I just want to love, and I just want to be together.”

Everhart can't believe she's the second person in her family to go through the transplant process and that she followed her sister through the process.

In 2012, her older sister Cannon began experiencing chest pain and rapid heart rate. The symptoms persisted for several days, so she called her doctor and made an appointment. The next day, the 34-year-old mother's left arm began to feel numb and tingle. At the time, she happened to be on the phone with Everhart, who insisted her sister go to the ER near their home in Nashville.

“They told me I was having a heart attack,” said Cannon, 46, who runs a Southern home-cooked restaurant. restaurant Food truck in Elmhurst, Illinois; seasoning blending company With her chef husband, Tony Cannon.

However, further tests revealed that there was no problem with her arteries. She was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), the most common inherited heart disease that affects 1 in 500 people. It is also the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young people and athletes. According to Northern Western medicine.

“I had never heard of that. They said, 'It wasn't actually a heart attack,' so I thought that was good news,” Cannon said.

Because HCM is a genetic disease, Cannon's parents and two sisters were tested. they were negative.

But the symptoms seemed familiar to her youngest sister. When she was 19, Everhart went to the emergency room with chest pains. “I dug up the paperwork and it said 'mild HCM,'” she tells PEOPLE. (At the time, she went to see a cardiologist and was told that she had “unexplained chest pain.”)

However, doctors who examined Everheart this time found that it was “slightly thick, but not thick enough to cause HCM,'' Cannon recalls.

The day after his diagnosis, Cannon was surgically fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator and pacemaker. Unfortunately it was only a temporary fix. “I was hoping it would get better, but it didn't. I was declining,” Cannon says.

Over the next five years, Cannon continued to get sick. In 2015, she went for a second opinion. Northwestern Medicine Bloom Heart and Vascular Institutehas a team of HCM specialists. They were to take care of her from that point on.

In May 2016, the sisters returned from Nashville to their family home in Roselle, Illinois, to prepare for what was to come.

Cannon underwent a heart transplant on February 27, 2017. While my husband continued to work, my sister stayed by my side and helped take care of our two young children.

Cannon recovered well from the surgery and was actually able to get up and walk within six hours. In fact, a few months after the transplant, she was back working out. Cannon took Everhart to an aerobic hip-hop class.

Cannon felt good, but Everhart had to sit out after five minutes. She says she remembers thinking she was going to die. She continued to cry as her sister insisted that she go to the doctor. In April 2017, Everhart received confirmation that she too had HCM, despite testing negative years earlier.

“The disease often runs in families, but it can look very different,” explains the cardiologist. Dr. Esther VolovichAdvanced Heart Failure and Transplant Experts at Northwestern Medicine's Broom Heart and Vascular Institute;

“Just because you have that gene doesn't necessarily mean you'll have the same disease symptoms or how severe or aggressive the disease will be,” she says. There is a “level of uncertainty” and people will have to “see how it plays out.”

Until that exercise class, Everhart had spent years ignoring worsening symptoms, including an inability to walk more than a few blocks. When I went to the beach with my friends, I drove myself so I could sit in an air-conditioned area if I felt too hot.

“It feels like someone is squeezing my heart as hard as they can,” Everhart said, adding that it has become more frequent. “There were a lot of signs,” Everhart says.

“She wanted to deny it,” Cannon says. “She was misdiagnosed several times, which is common with this disease. Very common.”

Everhart agrees. “I was very negative,” she says. “I had seen my sister suffer from heart disease and I didn't want to go through that.”

In May 2022, the sisters vacationed at a lakeside home in Michigan. During that trip, Cannon contracted the coronavirus. Everhart was caring for her sister, but then became ill herself. Her sister got better, but Everhart didn't.

They thought Everhart had asthma or a long-term bout with the coronavirus, but doctors determined in November 2022 that she was suffering from heart failure.

Tests for heart transplantation began in December 2022. Tests were completed in May 2023, and she was officially added to the transplant list.

On January 29, 2024, Everhart received the phone call she had been waiting for. Doctors found her a new heart. Cannon drove her to the hospital for heart transplant surgery.

Cannon understood everything his sister was going through and helped her on her journey.

“It was really amazing to see that kind of sisterly support, and what a relief it was for the second sister to be able to see that from the inside,” Volovich, a cardiologist, tells PEOPLE.

“They're really tough women and they've been through a lot. I think it was great to see them manage to support each other and get through this with the support of this amazing family. ”

The sisters had always been very close, but the transplant brought them even closer.

“It recreated our entire family and brought us all to a deeper level of life and love,” Everhart says.

They share their stories in hopes of encouraging others register Becoming an organ donor.

Everhart is currently writing a letter to the donor's family.

“We want our loved ones to know that they are loved and cared for,” Everhart said. “I always think about my donors and this Christmas I will be thinking about them and their families.”

She's going to tell them: “I'm a social worker who helps people all day long. If it weren't for your loved ones, I wouldn't be here to give back like this. So, especially this holiday season, those are the things that mean the most to me. It is also meaningful.”