A Daughter's Last Gift

A young woman killed in a car accident saves her father's life by donating her heart for a transplant

The gift of life is never meant to be returned, especially not wrapped in plastic, packed in ice and enclosed in a small Igloo cooler. But that is precisely the transaction that occurred last week at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, where doctors took the heart of a 22-year-old who died following a car crash and sewed it inside the body of her father.

Chester Szuber, a retired Christmas-tree-farm owner, had been tormented by heart disease for 20 years. He had endured three open-heart surgeries and two operations to clear his arteries. Four years ago, he was put on...

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