At just 11 months old, Elias Robinson-Rodriquez underwent a type of heart transplant so rare it had previously been performed on only six children globally.
"Elias is [12-months-old] and he's already had three open-heart surgeries," Dr. Carlos Mery, surgical director of the Heart Transplant Program at Dell Children's, told"GMA.""It's not like you can have innumerable open-heart surgeries in a lifetime, because every time that you go in, there's more scar tissue and stuff, so it starts getting harder and harder for these patients to lead normal lives in the long-term.
"What we do with a partial heart transplant is we basically take a heart that's otherwise not usable for a transplant -- the muscles aren't good, the functions aren't good -- and we bring it, just as if we were doing a transplant, to our operating room," Mery said."In the operating room, we extract the aortic valve, live, and we use that to implant it and replace the valve with the hope that as time goes by, since this valve is live, it will continue to grow.
She said that mom's support, combined with her and Rodriquez's desire to give Elias the best quality of life possible, led them to choose the partial heart transplant option.Courtesy of Abigail Robinson "They were thinking they'd get a call about lab work, and instead we told them a donor had been found," Mery recalled."I'm glad because these donors are not that common. For us to be able to get a donor for a partial heart transplant, it needs to be a donor where the muscles aren't [good enough to make them] a good candidate for a full transplant, which could [otherwise] be the priority.
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