It took four attempts—and a lifetime of preparation—for 56-year-old Veronika Meyer to successfully summit Mt. Everest carrying a tiny passenger: her St. Jude Medical mechanical heart valve, which has kept her mountaineer’s heart pumping for 10 years.

After turning back on previous attempts due to illness and dangerous weather conditions, Meyer finally reached the world’s highest summit on May 16, 2007, making Everest the last of the “seven summits” she’s conquered—the tallest peak on each continent.


For more than 20 years, the Swiss chemist was forced to weigh her deep-seated drive to climb against her very real fear of losing consciousness or falling due to dizziness caused by her aortic valve disease. Mountain climbing always won out. Meyer, who grew up with a view of the Swiss Alps and a powerful fascination for mountain climbing, learned that she had aortic valve disease at age 23. The disease occurs when one of the four valves that control blood flow to and from the heart doesn’t function properly.

“[For years,] the condition didn’t affect me, but I was always a bit frightened,” admits Meyer. “I knew that the doctors did not recommend strenuous sports. I never asked them what could happen.” Although she was worried about her heart, she never let it keep her down: “When I’d go out to climb, I’d think, maybe it might be better to stay home,” she says. “But I had to do it. I had to climb.”

In 1997, as the 45-year-old Meyer conquered the last of the “four-thousander” peaks (those higher than 4,000 meters) in Switzerland, she noticed symptoms of her disease. She scaled back on serious climbing and stuck to mountain hiking for a while, but recalls, “I felt like I was hiking with the handbrake on.” She scheduled heart valve replacement surgery—and continued to hike right up until she was admitted to the hospital.

After having her faulty heart valve replaced with a St. Jude Medical model, Meyer was back in her beloved mountains just five weeks after the surgery. In the 10 years since, she’s never looked back. The new valve will last for her lifetime. And, unlike the first two decades, Meyer has no restrictions on her activity and no fear of heart failure.

With the seven summits under her belt, Meyer’s current goal is to climb 1,000 peaks—each measuring 6,000 feet or higher. That may seem daunting, but she’s already climbed 902—most of those in the nearby Alps. In fact, it’s likely that Meyer will need a new mountain climbing goal within a few years. Meyer has been tremendously successful as a world-class climber.

But her greatest achievement is not that she made history as the first person with an artificial heart valve to summit Everest. It’s the fact that she’s refused to let a chronic health condition slow her pursuit of a lifelong passion and that when the time was right she calmly took steps to correct her condition. It’s also her continued enthusiasm for setting and achieving tough goals, even as she approaches 60.

Veronika Meyer kept a journal of her Mt. Everest climb. Here is her account of summiting Everest from May 17, 2007: I am very happy and proud to tell you that we reached the summit of Everest (8,850 meters, 29,035 feet) on May 16 at 4 a.m. Conditions were excellent this year with a lot of snow, but in addition all of us were strong. We were the first to reach the summit on this day. We stayed there for a quarter of an hour only and then headed down. The zipper of my down suit was frozen, so I could not take out my camera, which I was wearing on my chest. But [one of the sherpas] took some pictures, one of them showing me with the St. Jude Medical flag.

About the Author: Jane Jerrard is a freelance writer based in Chicago.