Taylor Givens and Collin Kobelja found love in an unlikely place — the hospital recovery room.
The couple told CBS News that they both received heart transplants on the same day at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia in 2011.
Taylor, a trained soprano singer with a close circle of friends and a goal of becoming a music therapist, found out during her senior year of high school that her heart was enlarged and was failing to pump sufficient blood throughout her body.
The percentage of blood being pumped out of her heart, which should be about 60 percent and above, was 10 percent. Taylor’s prognosis was grim.
Taylor Givens, now 29, had a heart transplant after being diagnosed with viral cardiomyopathy. Kobelja, now 34, was going through his second transplant after being born with a chronic heart condition.
After their surgeries, Givens and Kobelja were placed in neighboring rooms for their recovery care.
“There were really no romantic sparks at first because we were both miserable,” Taylor Givens recalled to CBS News.
But Taylor Givens and Kobelja eventually reconnected on the fifth anniversary of their transplants as he visited doctors at the hospital.
While in town, Kobelja contacted Givens, and the two went out for dinner, where they got to know each other better outside the walls of a hospital. Because they had both undergone heart transplants, the pair found they already had a shared understanding of what the other was going through.
“It was cute because we had to take our medicine at the same time, the same medicine,” Givens recalled. “I definitely felt a spark and I wasn’t expecting that at all.”
Givens and Kobelja married in 2019 after dating. They now live in Maryland.
The couple still faces serious health challenges. Kobelja underwent his fourth heart transplant last year and Givens is in remission from lymphoma.
However, they both agree that having each other has made facing these challenges easier.
“We’ve both been through essentially one of the worst experiences you can go through in life,” Kobelja said. “It definitely feels like anything else life throws at us, we can handle.”