Survives marathon surgery.
A nine-month-old UK boy has survived a marathon life-saving surgery after doctors stopped his thumbnail-sized heart for 15 hours. Nathan Byrne, son of Lesley Condie and David Byrne has finally returned to his normal life after about six months of struggling, reported Mirror.
The complex surgery was necessary to save the life of the baby who otherwise would not have lived more than six months according to the doctors who treated him.
Born with a hole in his heart, Nathan’s complications were diagnosed after he was transferred to Glasgow Children’s Hospital at four days old.
“We were devastated but we were told it would be six months before he would need his surgery, to give him time to grow. But Nathan was only three-and-half months when he had it,” Lesley Condie told Mirror.
The parents took Nathan to the hospital three months earlier than planned to conduct the surgery to close the hole in his heart, after he was struck down with two respiratory infections and suffered constant spells where he would go blue and limp.
“The scariest thing was putting him to bed because we didn’t know if was happening in his sleep,” Lesley said.
Nathan was connected to a machine that kept him alive during the surgery. Every time doctors tried to remove the machine, his heart, and lungs stopped.
The parents were told that the surgery would take about seven hours. But it took 15 hours for the surgeons to complete the complex surgery to bring Nathan back to life.
Nathan was hooked up to an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine, which circulated his blood outside his body, for three days, to give his organs time to recover.
The boy had to be starved for 10 days after a bowel infection that left the organ “on the verge of bursting.” He developed blood clots in his brain and suffered several withdrawal symptoms after coming off the morphine he’d been given to combat pain.
“To look at him, you would never know what he’s been through. He has so much energy and never stops smiling. It is amazing he still does that, considering all that he has been through,” added his mother.
The doctors attached him to a state-of-the-art life-support machine to keep the baby alive after surgery. His chest had been left open for seven days.
The boy spent about three months in the hospital before returning to home with his parents. “For six or seven weeks, we couldn’t see an end to it. Then one morning we came in and he just looked different. He still had the ventilator taped to his mouth but he tried to smile and I knew he was going to come off it,” said Lesley.