Add to Google personal 
02:18 PM PST on Saturday, January 31, 2004
PORT ORCHARD, Wash. - Had Sadie Fisher been born more than 10 years ago,
she might not be here today. But new technologies have allowed children
born with heart defects to live normal lives.
Eight-year-old Sadie loves swinging on the monkey bars and playing with
her cousin and little brother at her home in Port Orchard, Wash.
If it weren't for the scar on her chest, you wouldn't even know she was
born with a congenital heart defect.
“When she was one-week-old we went and had an echocardiogram because she
had a murmur that didn't go away,” said her mother, Holly. “At that
point the doctor told us she had hypoplastic left heart syndrome.”
The left side of Sadie's heart was severely underdeveloped and not
pumping blood to the rest of her body.
Eleven days after Sadie was born, she underwent her first open-heart
surgery so that doctors could "rewire" her little heart.
“It was devastating,” said Holly. “She was our first child and I was
scared. But I felt confident in the doctors at Children's.”
That was the first step in a series of operations Sadie would have. In a
team approach that involved surgeons and cardiologists, doctors
performed two more open-heart procedures on Sadie - one at four months,
another at age 2 - all of it mapped out in stages by doctors at
Children's Hospital in Seattle.
“Babies born with this condition never survived (in the past),” said Dr.
Tom Jones, director of the cardiac catherization lab at Children’s
Hospital. “They typically died within days or weeks of life. Now that we
have this staged approach we have been able to be increasingly
successful with the final outcome.”
Sadie recently underwent the last procedure to close a hole in her
heart. This capped a long journey to repair what her parents call her
"designer" heart.
With the delicate manipulation of a catheter through a large vein, and
with the use of x-ray to see inside Sadie's chest, Dr. Jones was able to
inject a dye and see exactly where the hole was.
Using a specially designed valve, Dr. Jones implanted the device and
closed the hole.
“This is as close as we can come to a cure,” said Dr. Jones. “Her heart
will still be special. She'll still need frequent checkups and her
circulation is still working harder than normal. The only real cure that
we hope to achieve at some point in the future is going to depend on a
genetic discovery.”
