Holly BaltzLake Worth Beach infant was born in December with severe heart defects.
Mabel Rose Correal, born with a remote chance of survival because of multiple severe congenital heart defects, has a new heart.
But like her birth in December, the transplant came with a bumpy ride.
On Aug. 5 — her grandmother’s birthday — Mabel Rose’s parents, Hanna and Mateo of Lake Worth Beach, walked their baby down the hall at UF Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville about 10 pm to undergo transplant surgery.
Judy Love of Lake Worth Beach, Hanna’s mother, had predicted the surgery would happen that very day.
Hanna announced the good news Monday on Facebook, but first she expressed her gratitude to a grieving family she probably didn’t know.
“A family in the hardest time of their lives made the decision to give our baby girl a chance at life through the donation of their child’s heart,” Hanna said.
Baby goes into cardiac arrest
After the 12-hour surgery, Hanna said, a valve in Mabel Rose’s donor heart didn’t close completely, leaking blood backward into another chamber. Making matters worse, the coronary bypass needed during the surgery had been hard on the infant’s kidneys, causing fluid buildup and making the leak worse.
On Friday, doctors opted for a procedure that created a controlled leak in her heart to relieve the backflow.
During the procedure, Mabel Rose went into cardiac arrest, Hanna said.
For 20 minutes, a doctor massaged her heart until the medical team got her connected to a machine known as ECMO, a temporary form of life support that removes carbon dioxide from the blood and sends warm, oxygenated blood back to the body, the Mayo Clinic reports.
It is helping Mabel Rose improve while her donor heart rests and recovers, Hanna said.
A rough beginning
Mabel Rose was born at a Royal Palm Beach birthing center on Dec. 13, missing the lower left chamber of her heart. That made it harder for the baby’s heart to pump blood with oxygen out to the rest of her body. A heart valve also was leaking, and one of her kidneys had made its way through a hole in her diaphragm to sit atop one of her lungs.
After Mabel Rose was born during a “peaceful” 36-hour labor, the midwife immediately saw her struggling and sent her to HCA Florida Palms West Hospital. Doctors there realized the newborn needed more specialized care than its neonatal intensive care unit could offer. Within 30 minutes, doctors decided Mabel Rose must go to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami.
Mabel Rose’s condition is called hypoplastic left heart syndrome, one of the most complex congenital defects in newborns, Nicklaus Children’s states on its website. There’s no clear cause.
A 1992 study published in Chest Journal could find only nine cases ever reported in English medical literature. The condition has only a 1% to 5% chance of survival.
Children normally can be treated in the first three or four years of life with three open-heart surgeries, but Mabel Rose was ineligible because of her leaky heart valve.
Surgeons at Nicklaus Children’s fixed Mabel Rose’s diaphragm and stabilized her. She was then moved to Shands to await a transplant. Once there, Dr. Mark Bleiweis implanted a Berlin Heart, an exterior device that pumps blood to keep children stable until a heart is available, which is typically six to nine months.
‘A beautiful, faithful village’
Now doctors are starting to wean Mabel Rose off ECMO in trials, introducing the immunosuppressants she will take for life. The family is grateful.
“We ask for continuous prayers in this time, and we are proud to have such a beautiful faithful village holding us through the storm,” Hanna said on Facebook.
“We still have a ways to go, but Mabel Rose has a beautiful donor heart inside of her. Mabel Rose has a fighting chance, and of course, she is doing just that. Fighting. Hard.”
