Sarah Murnaghan, the girl who received two lung transplants and temporarily changed the rules on organ donation, is finally heading home.
Sarah has had cystic fibrosis since birth, she was in critical condition after waiting 18 months for a lung transplant, CNN reported. Her first transplant was unsuccessful after a case of pneumonia, but the 11-year old has made a valiant recovery.
Sarah is getting ready to go home for the first time in about six months. Her lung biopsies have shown zero percent signs of rejection, and she has been taken off her oxygen machine.
"I'm very excited," Sarah told CNN. "I would like to play with my brothers and sister."
The brave girl also has dreams of going horseback riding and joining a soccer team.
"We haven't been a family in a while," Janet, the girl's mother, said. "It's ... hard to be a family when half the family lives at CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) and half lives at home."
Sarah will participate in three hours of physical therapy a day to relearn how to walk after her body was paralyzed and in a medically induced coma for three weeks.
"The lungs are doing great," Fran, Sarah's father, told CNN. "What's really exciting is that we know we are on the road to recovery now."
The recovery is expected to take between nine months and a year.
When CNN asked Sarah if she considered herself tough she responded:
"Yes, very. Because every time I faced things that I thought were going to be hard, then I've done them."
"I fully plan to watch her graduate from college and watch her get married someday and do whatever it is she wants to do," Janet said. "I just don't think they're going to be as easy for her to obtain those things as somebody else, but I think she is going to have them."
Sarah's parents got a judge to temporarily change a national policy which keeps children 12 and under off the emergency adult lung transplant list.
"I'm not going for easy. I'm just going for possible... And what's in front of me right now is possible," Sarah said.
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