From Double Transplant to Hustle Chicago - Laura Valentine is a Rare Individual

For most people, having a nine-year-old daughter in the third grade would be a handful. For most people, teaching science would be quite challenging. For most people, getting a doctorate would be considered a tall order. And for most people, training to complete a 1,632-stair climb would be a herculean task. A rare person would take on all this at once. Laura Valentine is an extremely rare person – this is her life. To say she has a lot on her plate is an understatement.

Being a mom, teacher, and doctoral student aren’t the only rare things about her. Laura was born with Situs Inversus Totalis (SIT.) SIT is a rare congenital condition in which the internal organs in one’s chest and abdomen are reversed. The Cleveland Clinic characterizes SIT as a mirror-image transposition of a normal anatomy.

Laura describes it simply this way, “All of my organs are flipped; my heart is on my right side. Obviously, everybody else’s on their left side. My liver is on my left side; yours is on your right.”

SIT is so rare, it only affects 0.01% of the population. According to The Science Times, it affects approximately one in every 10,000 to one in 20,000 people. Until the advent of modern medicine, SIT usually went undiagnosed. That’s because the condition is usually asymptomatic. Most people don’t know they have it and live a normal life. It is often discovered accidentally, for unrelated medical reasons or sometimes congenital heart issues.

But Laura always knew she had SIT. “I was basically born with half a heart, so I didn’t have, you know … the normal heart has four chambers, and I only had three; things were missing, parts weren’t there,” she explains.

Laura has had quite the medical journey. A few years back, she had several medical issues that involved failing organs and two prior fontans. She knows how to explain medical information, simply and easily.

Two years ago, there were number of events that led to another heart transplant. It “was because my original heart was pumping so much blood. It was doing so much more work than a normal heart, because there’s only three parts to it,” Laura said simply.

In November 2023, she heard from her medical team. She explained “they basically said, we need to figure out if your liver just needs to go, or if your heart’s causing all your organs to fail. We found out it was indeed my heart, so then I went through a transplant evaluation process.”

Laura was a transplant candidate for both heart and liver. The three-month waiting time allowed her medical team to plan the difficult and complicated procedure. To begin, they sent intensive scans to Germany to create a 3D model of her crest cavity in order to visualize how to execute the procedure. Laura described the surgery as “one giant, 20+ hour procedure. Same donor, my heart and my liver came from the same person.”

To encourage a quick recovery, Laura’s University of Chicago medical team spoke to her shortly after her surgery about participating in the Hustle Chicago® stair climb.

Laura said candidly, “I was in recovery and I remember thinking, like I’m 10 days post-transplant, and you’re talking about climbing all these stairs, sir. I can’t even walk down the hallway. You may be over-estimating my ability.”

As Laura began to recover, she thought more about the climb. She was encouraged to take on the training at her own pace but to join the U of C team. “They obviously aren’t timing me; it was just more of a community thing,” Laura says, “but for me, it eventually became about honoring my donor.”

Laura climbed all 94 floors at last year’s stair climb with her fiancé and completed it. This year, both Laura and her fiancé will do the iconic stair climb again. Last year, Laura finished in 55 minutes. Now she says, “I want to try for 35 minutes this year. I want to cut my time down by 20 minutes. So, right around half.”

Laura is hoping to raise $1,000 for Respiratory Health Association (RHA) for this year’s climb. “My donor gave me an incredible lease on life. I can do things I never was able to do before because I didn’t have all of the parts needed to do them.”

The Hustle Chicago stair climb, established in 1998, has become a prestigious charity stair climb where participants climb to the top of the former Hancock building in Chicago. The climb, scheduled for February 22, 2026, consists of 1,632 steps to reach the top floor, all while enjoying sweeping city and lake views. Proceeds from the annual climb, now in its 29th year, benefit Respiratory Health Association (RHA) in their mission of preventing lung disease and promoting clean air. Register at RespHealth.org/Hustle.