Doctors Give Toddler a Second Heart
Posted on: Friday, 22 October 2004, 22:00 CDT
STANFORD, Calif. -- A little girl just a week shy of her second birthday has become the youngest person in the United States ever to receive a "piggyback" heart transplant, a procedure that involved implanting a second heart into her tiny chest.
The surgery took place at Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital on September 16, when Camila Gonzalez was just 22 months old. The hospital held a news conference highlighting the rare surgery now that the South Lake Tahoe toddler is well enough to call it a success.
"She's an amazing little girl," Dr. Dan Bernstein, the hospital's chief of pediatric cardiology, said as Camila sat on her mother's lap scribbling with a crayon.
Camila suffers from cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disease that had caused the blood pressure in her lungs to build to five times normal levels. A conventional heart transplant wasn't an option because the new heart would have failed under such great pressure.
Her doctors also abandoned the idea of a heart-lung transplant because they would have had to wait longer to secure both organs. It took a medical team about four hours to add and connect Camila's second heart, said Dr. Bruce Reitz, chair of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine.
The child's mother, Maria Gonzalez, said that when doctors told her they wanted to give Camila a second heart, she wasn't sure what they were talking about. "I never see that," she said. "I asked them, `Maybe you are going to practice on my baby?'"
Although such heterotopic transplants aren't performed often, Camila's doctors say she will be able to have a normal life with two hearts, each of which maintains its own distinct rhythm. Of the eight children who received a second heart between 1997 and 2001, five are still alive and doing well.
If either of Camila's twin hearts ever fail, doctors will be able to replace them with a single new one because Camila's lungs will have returned to their proper pressure and size, said Reitz.
Source: Associated Press/AP Online
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