Jeramy Roebuck

Too old for decorated shoeboxes and drugstore valentines, students at Frisco's Pioneer Heritage Middle School discovered another way to give their hearts on Tuesday. Heart transplant recipients shared their stories with science classes. Working on behalf of the Dallas-based Southwest Transplant Alliance, speakers across Texas urged students to consider organ donation on Valentine's Day.

"You have to take care of your heart, and you have to start doing it now, or it's going to be too late," former kindergarten teacher Barbara Allen said.

Relating to young teens was hardly a stretch for the 24-year-old Garland resident. Her new heart came from a 14-year-old.

"A lot of people think only older people need transplants," she said. "Well, not always."

After the birth of her first child in August 2004, Mrs. Allen became ill. She could hardly get up off the couch and struggled to keep food down.

Doctors diagnosed her with respiratory diseases, gastritis and several other maladies before determining that she suffered from postpartum cardiomyopathy. Most common among blacks, women over 30 and those carrying multiple children, the disorder involves a failure of the heart's left ventricle after pregnancy.

"I didn't fit into any of those categories," Mrs. Allen said. "I was healthy. I didn't smoke or do drugs. I exercised."

Opting for an experimental treatment device designed by NASA and the Baylor College of Medicine, a pump was put on her heart to regulate its beating with a machine Mrs. Allen carried in a backpack.

Her situation began to improve. She could soon leave the house and learn to care for her newborn daughter, Addyson. But months later, the pump woke her with loud beeping.

"I went to the emergency room thinking the machine had to be reset," she said. "But they said my heart was failing again."

Within two weeks, Mrs. Allen had a new heart from a 14-year-old girl who died in a four-wheeler accident.

"There's not one day that goes by that I don't think about [that girl]," Mrs. Allen said. "Who was she? What was her favorite color?"

Jim Kuykendall of Denton received his transplant after suffering a heart attack in 1998. He had the chance to meet the family of his 21-year-old donor.

The man's mother approached Mr. Kuykendall at a ceremony honoring her son. In the span of a few months, she had lost her son in a car accident, her husband to terminal cancer and her mother.

"The woman was understandably a wreck," Mr. Kuykendall said. "She came up to me, put her head on my chest and asked if I was coming home with her."

No one is too young to consider organ donation, Mr. Kuykendall said.

Although the middle school students can't legally declare themselves organ donors, he urged them to share their feelings on donation with their parents.

"If the time comes to make that decision, it makes it so much easier on your family if they know what you think," he said. "To me [that decision] meant a lot."