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The actual preparation is done at a transplant center. Patients are often enrolled for a transplant months in advance. And there are far more patients waiting to get a transplant than there are actually organs available. But when a person finds a matched donor heart, then that heart is brought into an operating room where the patient is prepared and the heart is then transplanted. A typical operation could take from four hours to 12 hours, and the recovery is somewhat slow and prolonged because of what the patient undergoes. After the patient gets the transplant, there’s a very strict regimen the patient has to follow that has to do with compliance with the medications that suppress immune reactions to the transplanted heart.
