Don and Danielle Coleman on Wednesday got the best early Christmas present they could imagine: a new heart for their baby.
Sean Coleman, 5 months old, who suffered from the same rare heart defect that claimed his older brother, Patrick, underwent a four-hour heart-transplant operation Wednesday morning at University Medical Center.Sean is the second-youngest child ever to receive a donor heart there.
The surgery went well, and Sean is doing "great," said Dr. Jack Copeland, who performed the procedure.
But whether Sean will survive for a long time is unknown. The longest-surviving recipient of an infant heart transplant, which was performed in 1985 at Loma Linda University Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, is now 10 years old.
There was also a bittersweet note to the otherwise joyous occasion.
Sean's donor heart was from a 15-month-old child in Houston who died after being shaken by a baby-sitter, Copeland said.
"There's a family right now going through the hardest time of their life," said Don, who, along with his wife, chose to donate the organs of 13-month-old Patrick after he died last spring during heart surgery.
"But, like with Patrick, we want them to know that part of him is living on. What they did was a godsend - a miracle."
Danielle was tired but happy during a press conference Wednesday afternoon at the hospital.
"I'm pretty blown away," she said. "It hasn't quite sunk in."
The Colemans had been up since early Tuesday evening, when they got a phone call from a hospital official saying a heart might be available for Sean. The surgery began around 4:30 a.m. Wednesday, when the donor heart was flown in from Houston.
Copeland said he was not sure at first that the heart would work. It was bigger than Sean's, was in a fairly distant city, and the donor child had been suffering from pneumonia and had other health problems.
But the heart is now beating strongly in Sean and his lungs are working well, Copeland said. If all goes well, Sean could be home from the hospital by next week.
"It's scary," Don said. "We just went over one hurdle today."
Sean will have to take anti-rejection medicine for the rest of his life.
Doctors say that the younger the child, the more likely it is that the operation will be successful, because the immune system hasn't developed enough to reject the transplant.
Surgeons at Loma Linda, the nation's leading hospital for children's heart transplants, have performed about 200 transplants on babies less than 6 months old. About 75 percent of those children have survived.
The youngest child ever to receive a transplant at University Medical Center was 3 days old but died the same day.
"We intend for Sean to be our youngest survivor," Copeland said.
Despite the uncertain future, the Colemans are relieved to be done with the congenital heart problem that killed Patrick and almost killed Sean. The defect is an abnormal thickening of the heart muscle that prevents it from pumping properly.