Sisters Who Had Heart Transplants 7 Years Apart Celebrate Christmas with a 'Deeper Level of Life and Love' (Exclusive)

Meredith Everhart is celebrating Christmas this year with her family — and her new heart. She and her sister Abbey Cannon, who are 7 years apart, both had heart transplants at age 38. This Christmas, they have a newfound appreciation for being together over the holidays.

“I’m so thankful to be alive,” says Everhart, a 39-year-old social worker. “I just want to give and I just want to love and I just want to have us all together.”

Everhart can't believe she is the second person in her family to go through the transplant process — and that she followed her sister to get there.

In 2012, her older sister Cannon started having chest pain and fast heartbeats. The symptoms lasted a couple days, so she called her doctor and made an appointment. The next day, the 34-year-old mom’s left arm went numb and started tingling. At the time, she happened to be on the phone with Everhart, who insisted her sister go to the ER near her home in Nashville.

Related: Triathlete, 38, Survives After ‘Widow Maker’ Heart Attack Leaves Him 'Dead for Several Minutes' During Race

“They told me that I had a heart attack,” says Cannon, now 46, who owns a southern comfort food restaurant and food truck in Elmhurst, Ill., as well as a seasoning blend company with her chef husband, Tony Cannon.

However, further testing showed that her arteries were clear. She was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or HCM, the most common genetic heart disease, affecting 1 in 500 people. It is also the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young people and athletes, according to Northwestern Medicine.

“I'd never heard of it. I thought it was good news because they said, "You didn't actually have a heart attack," Cannon says.

Related: Utah Mom, 33, Has Heart Attack After Walking on Treadmill, 4-Year-Old Son Told His Dad She Was 'Sleeping'

Since HCM is a genetic condition, Cannon's parents and two sisters were tested; they were negative.

But the symptoms seemed familiar to her youngest sister: When she was 19, Everhart had gone to the emergency room with chest pain. “I dug out the paperwork and it said 'mild HCM,'” she tells PEOPLE. (When she followed up with a cardiologist at the time, she was told she had 'unspecified chest pain'.)

This time though, examining Everhart, doctors did see “a little thickness, but not enough to be HCM,” Cannon recalls.

The day after her diagnosis, Cannon got a surgically implanted defibrillator and a pacemaker. Unfortunately, it was just a temporary fix. "I expected to get better, and I just did not – I was declining,” Cannon says.

Over the next five years, Cannon continued to get sick. In 2015, she went for a second opinion at Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, which has a team of HCM specialists. They would handle her care from that point forward.

In May 2016, the sisters both moved from Nashville back into their parents’ home in Roselle, Ill., to prepare for what was to come.

Related: See the Joyful Moment a 6-Year-Old on Transplant List Tells Hospital Staff: 'I'm Getting a New Heart!'

Cannon received a heart transplant on February 27, 2017. Her sister was by her side and helped her care for her two young children while her husband continued working.

Cannon recovered well from her surgery and was actually up and walking within six hours. In fact, several months after her transplant, she was back to working out. Cannon took Everhart to a cardio hip hop class.

While Cannon felt great, Everhart had to sit down after five minutes. She says she recalls feeling like she was going to die. She was crying as her sister insisted she go to the doctor. In April 2017, Everhart got confirmation that she also had HCM, despite testing negative years before.

"It very much runs in families but it can look very different," explains their cardiologist Dr. Esther Vorovich, an advanced heart failure and transplant specialist at Northwestern Medicine Blum Cardiovascular Institute,

"Having the gene doesn't always mean you're going to have the same symptoms of the disease or how severe and aggressive the disease will be," she says. There's a "level of uncertainty," so people have to "see how it plays out."

Until that exercise class, Everhart had spent years trying to ignore her worsening symptoms, like not being able to walk more than a couple of blocks. If she and her friends went to the beach, she drove her own car so she could sit in air-conditioning if she felt too hot.

“You feel like somebody was squeezing your heart as hard as they possibly could,” Everhart says, adding that it started happening more frequently. “There were a lot of signs,” Everhart says.

“She wanted to deny it,” Cannon says. “She was misdiagnosed several times, which is common in this disease – very common.”

Everhart concurs. "I was in such denial," she says. “I had seen my sister suffer with her heart problems and I didn’t want to go through that.”

Related: College Student and Toddler She Babysits Share a 'Special Bond': They're Both Heart Transplant Survivors (Exclusive)

In May 2022, the sisters vacationed at a lake house in Michigan. During that trip, Cannon got COVID. Everhart took care of her sister, then got sick herself. While her sister got better — Everhart didn’t.

Everhart wondered if she had asthma or long COVID, but doctors determined she was in heart failure in November 2022.

In December 2022, she started testing for a heart transplant. In May 2023, the testing was complete and she was officially added to the transplant list.

On January 29, 2024, Everhart received the call she had been waiting for: Doctors had found a new heart for her. Cannon drove her to the hospital for the heart transplant surgery.

Cannon understood everything her sister was going through and helped her on her journey.

“It was really amazing to watch the sisterly support, and how much more comforting it was to the second one to have seen it from the inside," their cardiologist Vorovich tells PEOPLE.

“They're really tough ladies, and they've been through a lot. The way they manage to support each other and have this wonderful family of support, to get each other through this, I think has been fantastic.”

The sisters say they have always been very close, but the transplant brought them closer.

“It’s recreated our whole family and brought all of us to a deeper level of life and love,” Everhart says.

They share their story in hopes of encouraging others to register to become organ donors.

Right now, Everhart is writing a letter to her donor’s family.

“I want them to know that their loved one's heart is being loved and cared for,” Everhart says. “I think about my donor all the time. This Christmas I will be thinking about them and their family.”

She plans to tell them: “I'm a social worker that helps people all day long. I wouldn't be here to be able to give back like that without your loved one. And so they mean more to me than anything, especially this holiday season.”

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