Growing Your Baby - Parenthood from Pregnancy to Pre-school » Infant Heart Surgery

UPDATE: Little Fighter Born With Heart Outside Her Body

Lisa — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:14:20 +0000

Last week we introduced you to an amazing baby named Ashleigh Louw. Just 9 days ago she was born with a rare heart condition known as pentalogy of Fallot ectopia cordis and omphalocele, meaning her grew heart outside of her body while she was developing in-utero. Normally this can be fixed, but in Ashleigh’s case her heart has holes and is protruding from her chest because half of her rib cage did not develop.

Doctors have said that Ashleigh’s medical treatment ‘would be carried out in many stages and be multi-disciplinary in nature, requiring the work of various specialists and super-specialists’.

“The baby has a number of defects… it’s going to be in different phases.”acting CEO of Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital Dr Sanjee Lingham said.

After her first surgery yesterday, the little fighter was in stable condition.

Surgeons managed to close the abdominal wall and put the heart back in her chest, Dr Jerome Loveland, head of paediatric surgery at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg told journalists.

They could however not put the heart back in its normal position as this could trigger cardiac arrest, he said.

“The next 24 hours will be critical, but she remains stable. Time will tell. It can be a rocky boat. If all goes well she could be up and about in a week’s time.

“The defect is closed. To the naked eye it [the chest and abdominal wall] looks normal.”

There is no word when the next surgery will take place. Ashleigh’s length of recovery will likely dictate that schedule.

Ashleigh’s rare condition only affects one in a million babies and it consists of five associated defects, including structural abnormalities of the heart, a defect of the covering of the heart, a diaphragmatic defect, a sternal defect and a defect of the anterior abdominal wall.

According to academic literature, she has a 50 percent chance of survival.

This family is definitely in our prayers.

SOURCE

Amazing 27 Weeker Born A Fighter!

Jen R — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:38:36 +0000

Celly Reid’s “miracle baby” is on the road to a full recovery after life saving heart surgery. Little Amy is the fourth child for Reid and her husband Angus of Macduff, Banffshire, Scotland.

Due to arrive on December 12th, Amy was delivered at 27 weeks on September 13 by emergency Caesarean after an infection of the placenta began to pass toxins to the baby.

Weighing a fragile 1lb 15oz Amy was taken to the neonatal unit at Aberdeen Maternity Hospital where she was hooked to an IV, ventilator and heart and blood pressure monitors.

Having yet to even hold their newborn, the Reid’s were given frightening news. The doctors had discovered that a valve in an artery leading from Amy’s heart, which usually closes after the baby takes their first breath, had remained open. The faulty valve was causing blood to spill into the baby’s lungs and needed to be corrected.

After attempts to correct the problem with medication failed, Amy was flown to Glasgow for surgery at Yorkhill Hospital.

“We knew this was serious,” Reid said. “I asked the doctor if she was going to die and he said it was a possibility.”

At only five weeks old the surgery, to stitch the valve closed, was both rare and harrowing; but it was a success.

“We were told she was doing well and when she came back to Aberdeen I could see the surgery had worked wonders,” said Reid. “That was when she was finally well enough for me to be allowed to pick her up and give Amy her first cuddle after a whole five weeks.”

Amy is nearly four months old now and weighs a much healthier 6lbs 18oz. Her relieved parents couldn’t be happier. “I never thought I’d be so happy to be woken up in the middle of the night for feeds. But after being terrified I might lose her, it’s even more special being a mom to her now.” – Jen R, staff writer.

SOURCE

4-Lb. Tenn. Baby Undergoes Heart Bypass Surgery

Lisa — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:48:32 +0000

An amazing Tennessee baby has become one of the smallest babies in the world to have heart bypass surgery.

Tiny 4 pound Cole Latch underwent surgery at Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center in Memphis, Tenn., to repair a congenital heart defect.

The 1-month-old was born prematurely on Nov. 25 and had a cardiopulmonary bypass less than a week later.

“He was born at 35 weeks with a knot in his umbilical cord,” his dad, Shannon Latch, said in a news release. “They said he was one of the top 15 smallest babies in the world to have this surgery. They do this kind of thing all the time, just not on little babies.”

Cole is making progress and is off the ventilator, but he still has a long way to go.

“He takes the bottle good,” Latch said. “He’s getting better.”

While no date has been given for Cole’s homecoming, his parents hope that to take him home soon.

SOURCE

Doctors Perform Live-Saving Surgery on ‘Half Born’ Baby

Lisa — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:46:33 +0000

Doctors have saved the life of a Texas baby with an amazing surgery that allowed the baby to be half born called the Exit Procedure.

Baby Cagan was diagnosed with a huge mass in the chest in utero. Doctors were concerned because it was already pushing on the heart and most of the baby’s lung. If they left it untreated, he would have died because during pregnancy, the baby doesn’t have to breathe. The placenta does all of the work. But as soon as they are delivered, they have to take a breath, cry and do the things baby’s do, which is impossible to do if there is a ‘football’ lodged in their chest.

During the surgery, Cagan was “half” born, his head and shoulders were lifted out of his mom Marissa’s body, but he stayed connected to the umbilical cord.

“The baby’s being supported on the placenta. The baby doesn’t have to breathe,” said fetal surgeon Dr. Olutoye.

He removed the tumor which included one-third of Cagan’s lungs in just 18 minutes. Then the baby’s cord was cut, he was completely delivered, and he could breathe.

At Texas Children’s Hospital, they’ve done more than a dozen of these Exit Procedures to save babies who likely would not have survived after their birth.

Doctors say that Cagan’s lung will regenerate and he will look like a normal baby.

“The mass is out. His lungs are working well. He should have all this behind him,” said Dr. Olutoye.

The exciting part about all of this is that Cagan should be able to go home just two weeks after his original due date.

SOURCE

Miracle Baby Born With Heart Outside His Chest

Lisa — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:42:21 +0000

A five-day old baby is being described as a miracle after he survived being born with heart outside of this chest.

Vibha Devi, who was born on Thursday in a remote rural village in India’s Bihar state, was rushed by 24hr train to the capital by his desperate father.

Leaving his wife behind, Chander Manjhi and his father-in-law travelled to Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to try to save the child’s life.

During a complete check-up doctors found the baby also has multiple disorders. Apart from the protruding heart, he also has a hole in his heart and has a single pump (for pumping blood). A normal heart has two pumps.

Suffering from a condition known as Ectopia Cordis, which causes the heart to be abnormally placed inside or outside of the body, most babies die within hours of being born.

However, there is guarded optimism for Vibha after the child survived the arduous 800-mile train journey from Muzaffarpur to Delhi.

“He is stable and is being treated for infection. Once the infection goes, we will do the surgery,” said Dr A.K. Bisoi, a cardiologist at the Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery Department at AIIMS.

“His parents are lucky the baby is still alive even after infection as it has spread to all body parts. We are trying our best to save the baby.”

Due to the family’s income and the rarity of the child’s condition, cardiologists at AIIMS, including Dr Bisoi, are providing treatment for free.

A team of five surgeons is on stand-by to operate should Vibha survive the next few weeks.

“The surgery is a multi-layered procedure and might take months,” said Dr Bisoi.

“We have to create space step by step and the chest wall has to be reconstructed.

“In India, no infant with such a defect has survived,” Dr Bisoi added.

‘There are only three survivors suffering from the disease in the world. But this baby is the only one with two heart defects,’ he said.

‘It’s a miracle and challenge for doctors. Every extra day he survives gives us an opportunity to deal with the rare disease and we are learning a lot from the case. We are doing our best to ensure the child lives,’ Bisoi said.

For now, the baby’s heart has been covered with a synthetic membrane and infected blood fully replaced from his body.

In 2006, doctors in Florida, U.S. carried out a similar operation on Naseem Hasni who was born with his heart outside his chest.

Doctors wrapped his heart in Gore-Tex, a waterproof, breathable fabric used in outdoor clothing and medical applications. His heart was then wrapped in a layer of his own skin, to substitute for his missing pericardium, the sac that encloses the heart.

The heart was then slowly eased inside his chest.

SOURCE SOURCE

25 Weeker Fitted With An External Pacemaker

Lisa — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:05:01 +0000

In a world first, tiny Taylor Gardner has been fitted with a pacemaker bigger than her fragile body.

Born after just 25 weeks and weighing an unbelievable 540g, Taylor’s heart began to fail in the hours after her birth, forcing Melbourne’s Monash Medical Centre surgeons to try the untried.

The cardiac team wired an external pacemaker to her tiny heart, allowing her to stay alive so she can be fitted with a more conventional pacemaker in coming months.

A 19 week ultrasound revealed Taylor had a complete heart block found in 1 in 200,000 babies.

At that time her mother Rebecca Gardner was put on bedrest so that her pregnancy could be monitored.

“It was heart-wrenching, but I wanted her to survive because she is my 11th pregnancy and I only had one child,” Ms Gardner said.

“I just wanted her to be alive. Everything else you push to the back of your mind and then pray and hope.

“You just have to put on a brave face, lots of prayers and hope the surgeons can perform a miracle.

“She’s a fighter and she is feisty. Even though she has such tiny hands, I reckon all the nurses are wrapped around her little finger.”

Nine hours after her birth on May 25, Taylor’s heart rate was getting worse instead of better and she had to be rushed in for a pacemaker. As a result of her condition, her heart beat at between 40-50 beats a minute, rather than 150.

Although only a handful of premature babies in the world had ever been fitted with an external pacemaker – and none less than 750g – Dr Alex Veldman said surgeons had no other choice but to rewrite history.

“It is a bit like flying to the moon – you have to try something that was never attempted before,” he said.

“In a hospital like this we can have all the expertise and all the knowledge to make it as safe as possible, but, in the end, you still have to try to fly this thing.

“It is quite an amazing thing, because the size of the baby’s heart is half the size of a cherry, and to suture these wires on to that heart without injuring it is astounding.”

Five days after the miracle operation, Taylor’s bowel perforated and she needed another major operation.

Dr Veldman said that now she’s made it through the first week of her life, her biggest dangers were behind her.

For even the smallest internal pacemaker, Taylor will have to grow between 1.5kg and 2kg in three months before she is big enough to get one and able to leave the neonatal intensive care unit.

Other Amazing Babies:

SOURCE

Amazing Baby Doing Well After Her Heart Was Repaired In The Womb

Lisa — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:49:58 +0000

Called a first in Canada, doctors at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital and the Hospital for Sick Children have successfully repaired a baby’s heart while she was still in the womb.

At 30 weeks into her pregnancy, Vicki McKenzie had an ultrasound that showed her developing fetus had critical aortic stenosis, a condition in which the main outlet valve of the left ventricle is severely narrowed.

She was immediately referred Sick Kids and Mount Sinai where doctors explained that waiting to operate after birth would be too risky.

Untreated, her condition would inevitably lead to a lifelong condition called hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS). Children with HLHS typically need to have at least three major heart surgeries and are not expected to have a normal lifespan; the 10-year survival rate is only 65 per cent.

During the 37-minute procedure, doctors inserted the device through the mother’s abdomen and then directly into the baby’s heart to induce proper growth and function – and to prevent the child from dying of heart failure at birth.

Amazingly, the procedure allowed the baby, Océane, to remain safely in utero for another month until she was born on April 15.

“Any procedure you can do to a fetus in utero allows the baby to remain in the best intensive care unit that there is,” said Dr. Greg Ryan of Mount Sinai Hospital.

“It allows the baby to become more mature, so if this baby was delivered early, it faced … all of the complications of prematurity.”

Within an hour of the baby’s birth at Mount Sinai, she was whisked to nearby Sick Kids, where doctors fed another balloon catheter into her heart to further expand the aortic valve. A third followed a couple of weeks later.

Even though this utero surgery has been performed several times in the U.S., this is the first successfully surgery of it’s kind in Canada. The team of doctors attempted the procedure on two other much earlier fetuses. Neither survived.

“We have learned that what was a theoretical possibility is an actual possibility,” said Ryan.

“And we’ve not only seen that we can not just fix the valve, but we’ve seen that the left ventricle can recover. That’s what we were hoping would happen, but we were not entirely certain that it would happen until we saw it.”

Oceane is now doing well and expected to lead a normal childhood.

SOURCE SOURCE
PHOTOCREDIT:WIKI

Amazing Baby Continues To Fight After Being Taken Of Respirator

Lisa — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 05:23:23 +0000

Baby Kaylee continued to defy the odds yesterday, breathing on her own for a second day after she was removed from a respirator in anticipation that she would become a heart donor for another infant.

The two-month-old baby has Joubert’s Syndrome, a malformation of the brain that can compromise breathing, balance and development, and is not usually fatal.

She was admitted to The Hospital for Sick Children on March 16. The next day her parents read a March 17 news report in the Toronto Sun about another patient in the neo-natal intensive care unit, Lillian O’Connor, of Prince Edward Island, born March 9 with a fatal heart defect. It said two surgeons were at the ready to fly anywhere in North America to retrieve a suitable transplant heart. When Kaylee’s diagnosis was judged so severe she would die without continued breathing support, the babies seemed star-crossed. Kaylee could die, and her heart would keep beating.

The problem was that the hospital did not agree, saying Kaylee’s heart could be damaged as she died naturally. It later relented, saying in a statement this was a “complex situation” that “evolves on a day-to-day, and moment-to-moment basis.”

When her breathing machine was disconnected on Tuesday night, the country was in awe, not just for the scientific rarity and wonder of the impending transplant, but also the powerful image of the beating heart.

By Wednesday morning it became apparent that Kaylee’s survival may put the donor hopes in jeopardy. A donor and a recipient had been pre-matched for a life-saving donation, that was to not happen because the donor was still alive.

Today, this amazing baby is requiring oxygen to help her breathe, but is not on a respirator. Her parents said they don’t know if or when they would be asked to decide about putting her back on the machine because her breathing remains extremely erratic. She sporadically has periods “where she doesn’t breathe for 30 to 50 seconds,” her dad told the media today.

While no one knows what will happen over the next day, week or month, doctors have repeatedly told Kaylee’s parents that their daughter is going to die.

If she stabilizes doctors have told her parents that if they take her home, it would only be so she could die outside of hospital.

We wish this family strength and hope that the general public understands that it is hard to be under the microscope when your baby is slowly dying.

It was very brave of them to offer their daughter’s heart to any baby. Across Ontario, 26 children are awaiting organs, eight in need of a heart.

SOURCE

Baby Born With Heart On His Stomach

Lisa — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:07:51 +0000

A Chinese baby has stunned doctors after he survived being born with his heart on his stomach.

Surgeons said the boy would only live for less then a week after he was born in eastern China.

Now, more than a month later, the baby is home with his parents who are trying to raise $70,000 for an operation to move his heart into his chest.

The amazing baby was one of a set of twins but his brother was born with no complications.

“Both of us are very healthy, and we can’t understand why our son was born like this,”the baby’s dad, Lee Chen said.

“You can see the heart beating under his skin and we don’t dare let him sleep in a cot just in case he rolls on to his tummy and stops his heart beating.

“We take turns in holding him so he can sleep safely.”

“He needs an operation but we’re a poor family and we hope we can get help from some kindhearted people,” added Mr Chen.

I hope that these parents are able to raise the funds to save their baby. This little fighter deserves the chance to live normally. Related Articles: