MIAMI -- A 14-year-old girl who survived for nearly four months with a custom-built artificial heart was released from a hospital on Wednesday.

Earlier this year, DZhana Simmons was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently.

Simmons underwent her first heart transplant at the Holtz Childrens Hospital in Miami on July 2. Within days, it was obvious the transplanted heart was not working and needed to be removed.

Doctors scrambled to come up with a way for Simmons to survive until a new donor heart became available. A custom-made artificial heart was the solution. It looked like a large, complex machine, and Simmons was attached to it for 118 days.

"It was like I was a fake person, like I didn't really exist. I was just here," Simmons said. "Now, I know that I really was here and I did live without it."

"It was scary," said Simmons' mother, Twolla Anderson. "I didn't know from day to day how she was going to turn out or if it would've been fatal or what. Thanks to my buddies, the transplant team -- I love them for everything they've done for her -- I couldn't be happier."

On Oct. 29, Simmons received another donor heart and a kidney, as well.

Recently, Simmons talked to ABC News and described being hooked up to the machine for nearly four months as “scary."

“You didn’t know when it was going to malfunction," Simmons said.

Simmons was released from Holtz Children's Hospital on Wednesday. She will continue outpatient treatment for the next two months. The family is from South Carolina, but have decided to stay in South Florida permanently to be closer to Simmons' doctor.

Simmons is believed to be the first pediatric patient to survive for such a long period of time on a custom-made artificial heart.