Wearing a hospital mask over her face and a long scar on her chest, 14-year-old D'Zhana Simmons stood up from her wheelchair. She took a few tentative steps, sat down in front of the TV cameras and began to talk.

Barely audible, D'Zhana told how she lived for 118 days without a heart, in limbo between transplant operations, her blood circulated by a pair of mechanical pumps.

''Thank you,'' she said Wednesday, holding back tears, to the Holtz Children's Hospital transplant doctors sitting with her.

From July 4, when a first heart transplant failed, until Oct. 29, when she was well enough for another heart, D'Zhana's chest cavity was empty, doctors said. Beside her during that time was an artificial heart with two pumps. One took over for the heart's right ventricle, pumping blood to the girl's lungs; the other did the work of the left ventricle, pumping blood through her body.

''It was scary not knowing from day to day if it might be fatal,'' said D'Zhana's mother, Twolla Anderson, who brought her lanky daughter to Miami from their home in South Carolina. ``I give my thanks to my buddies. I love the transplant team.''

The procedure is not entirely experimental, said Dr. Si Pham, director of heart and lung transplantation for University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center, where Holtz is located. It was used for more than nine months for an adult man, he said -- but never before for a child.

''It's good to know we have the option now for small people,'' Pham said.

Such machines usually are used to help disease-weakened hearts pump blood. In this case, the first transplanted heart had to be removed, leaving the machine to do all the work.

''Her prognosis is the same as any other transplant patient,'' said Dr. Marco Ricci, director of pediatric cardiac surgery. ``She'll have to live on immunosuppressors to keep her body from rejecting the heart. But she'll be able to do most things a girl her age does -- go to school, go out.''

There's a 50 percent chance that within 12 or 13 years, D'Zhana will need another heart transplant, said Dr. Paolo Rusconi, director of pediatric cardiac transplants.

D'Zhana came to Holtz, which specializes in difficult cases, early this year after several hospitals in South Carolina couldn't help resolve pain in her left side, her mother said. D'Zhana lost her original heart to dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently, doctors said. She received a heart transplant July 2, but the new heart failed and was removed two days later. By then, she was too sick for another transplant, Ricci said.

For nearly two months, D'Zhana could breathe only with the help of a respirator; she had renal failure and was on dialysis; her liver was failing; she had severe gastrointestinal bleeding, making it hard to feed her. She was in danger of blood clots that could lodge in her brain.

Then D'Zhana started to improve, Ricci said. She asked to go outdoors and was taken to a door in a wheelchair, with several attendants pushing the heavy heart machine beside her.

''If you could only see the expression on her face,'' Ricci said. ``It's phenomenal for a 14-year-old to go through this.''

On Oct. 29, finally well enough, D'Zhana received a second new heart. The next day, she received a new kidney as well. She was transferred Wednesday to the Ronald McDonald House for two to three months of rehabilitation. Asked if she could remove her mask and smile, D'Zhana complied, with the barest grin imagineable.

''It feels better now that I can walk without the machine,'' she said. ``I want to play with my friends.''

On Saturday she will get a little farther from the machine, spending her 15th birthday at Bayside Festival Marketplace.

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