Surgeons at Primary Children's Hospital, a Children's Miracle Network Hospital, have hooked up the smallest artificial heart pump into the smallest patient ever, at least for anyone in Utah. It also marks the beginning of a whole new pediatric implant program there.
Eight-month-old Kaidence McCall Stephenson is alive tonight at Primary Children's thanks to a very little heart pump.
They're called ventricular heart assist devices, designed to take over the load of a failing heart, and they've been around a long time. More than 200 have been implanted in Utah adults since 1993.
However, this is not one of those big LVAD pumps. This little Berlin Heart, as it's called, was hooked up to the heart of eight-month-old Kaidence yesterday.
While tubes are implanted directly to the left side of her heart, the pump itself remains outside the body. It will keep Kaidence healthy while waiting for a real heart transplant, or maybe to let her heart rest so it just might recover on its own.
