Ukrainian Surgeons Just Pulled Off a Miraculous Heart Transplant Against Wild Odds
Surgeons pulled off something borderline impossible: a heart transplant on an 11-year-old kid whose anatomy was completely rewired.
When a kid has gone through five heart surgeries, four cardiac arrests, and has an ejection fraction under 10%, medical textbooks usually run out of optimistic chapters. But doctors at the Center for Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery in Kyiv decided to push through anyway.
The patient, 11-year-old Denys, had previously undergone the Fontan procedure. For anyone who isn't a pediatric surgeon, that essentially means doctors had already replumbed his major blood vessels to work around a missing ventricle. Trying to plug a new donor heart into that custom vascular maze is basically the surgical equivalent of defusing a bomb while rebuilding the engine.
A matching heart became available from a 13-year-old donor, and the team pulled off the country's first post-Fontan heart transplant. Just hours later, the boy was breathing on his own, and within a week he was chilling in a regular hospital ward with his mom.
Ukrainian medicine operating at sci-fi levels while the country is at war really puts everyday complaints into perspective.
Source: Facebook
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