On this day, Lexi Anderson is a radio star.

"Training to be a barrel racer? What's that?" the announcer asks.

"I don't know..." Lexi Anderson says with a laugh.

An active 13-year-old, but previously, the unthinkable happened. 

"I like riding horses, showing cattle, and playing lots of sports," Lexi says.

"I was playing basketball one day and all of the sudden, I, my, like I just blacked out on the court," Lexi says.

It quickly became even worse.

"It's called restrictive cardiomyopathy," Children's Wisconsin Medical Director of Heart Failure Dr. Alexander Raskin says. "Which is basically the heart muscle is very stiff."

"When you hear the only way your daughter is gonna live is to have a heart transplant, and the disease is such a rapid progression that it could be two years and that might be it -- the average is two years -- it's a very frightening, frightening thing," Lexi's mom, Tamala Anderson, says.

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"I didn't really think it was like, true," Lexi says. "I thought they were like lying to me. Until it actually like happened. And then I was like, okay, this is really happening. And I was really scared."

Medically, it's rare and difficult to manage.

"Once you start becoming symptomatic from it, we are on the clock," Dr. Raskin says.

"She was literally bones," Tamala says. "That's how you could see. So, she was 5'3 and weighed 78 pounds."

On Jan. 21, 2025, a little more than a year after passing out, she received the heart transplant she desperately needed.

"They basically saved my life," Lexi says.

"We came down. I kind of basically told the doctors, don't make me lose another one," Tamala says.

A transplant recipient after Tamala lost a daughter in a UTV accident and donated her organs five years earlier.

"We've been on both sides of it now. We've donated our daughter's organs and now we've received someone else's child's organs. You know, so we kinda know how hard it is, and so in that respect, we are extremely grateful," Tamala says.

The tubes drove Lexi nuts. And in no time, attacked her rehab.

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"She decided she was going to play softball," Tamala says. "So, she got back out on the field, and of course, saw the coaches were really worried. They were like, maybe you should put on catcher's gear."

"I'm back to everything that I love," Lexi says.

"She's been on fire, a fire that you just cannot put out," Tamala says.

With a new lease on life.

"This is why we do this," Dr. Raskin says. "So we can see kids going home and thriving."

"If it weren't for her team, she would not be here," Tamala says. "They saved my baby."