It is said that love will mend a broken heart. But when that heart is beyond repair, sometimes love still finds its way in through the cracks — and nobody knows that better than Taylor Givens and Collin Kobelja, two strangers who got heart transplants on the same day and ended up falling in love.
Givens and Kobelja’s story was recently shared by TODAY, but for the sake of honest journalism, I have to break the fourth wall here: I know Taylor Givens personally. We connected around seven years ago on Tumblr while both in the throws of teenage-hood, attempting to carry on “normal” lives after receiving heart transplants; Givens is my sister in cardiac woe. Because of this, theirs is a story I am especially grateful to be able to tell.
As Givens tells Bustle, she and Kobelja first encountered one another in 2011 at a INOVA Fairfax Hospital in Virginia. Sparks did not immediately fly, though that’s reasonable considering the circumstances — on June 9, 2011, then 17-year-old Givens and and then 22-year-old Kobelja both received heart transplants. Read more.
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