The Grand Entrance

This is an article on my birth!

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Philadelphia Daily News

Philadelphia Daily News (PA)

May 3, 1983

HEART SURGERY FOR NEWBORN BABE

Author: PAT McKEOWN, Daily News Staff Writer

Edition: 4*
Section: LOCAL
Page: 18

Index Terms:
MEDICINE CHILDREN PHILADELPHIA

Estimated printed pages: 2

Article Text:

In all the excitement of the birth of his first child, Sung Ho Chung didn’t notice anything unusual about the baby – at first.

“Then I saw the doctor’s face. She was so nervous about it, I felt something might be wrong with my Sarah,” Chung recalled.

Sarah was born Thursday night with the tip of her heart protruding from her chest. She was rushed from the Wilmington Medical Center to St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in North Philadelphia, where she was operated on successfully Friday afternoon – when she was 18 hours old.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunn, St. Christopher’s chief of cardiothoracic surgery, is so pleased with her progress he predicts Sarah will be able to go home to Newark, Del., with her parents in a week.

“We were really happy when we finished (the surgery),” Dunn said yesterday. “She’s breathing on her own. She doesn’t need a respirator. And she’s eating. Today her father gave her her first bottle.”

Sarah was born with a cleft sternum or breastbone which never closed over her heart. The attached ribs were also spread abnormally; the skin was separated. And the heart was tilted up so that the tip poked through the open skin.

The life-threatening condition is a milder form of ectopia cordis, where the heart is completely exposed. Dunn estimates there have only been some 100 cases of varying severity reported. Christopher Wall, a Marlton, N.J., boy was born with his heart outside his chest in August 1975 and became the first to survive the condition following surgery.

Sarah underwent 3 1/2 hours of surgery Friday during which the doctors brought her sternum back together, lenghtened her ribs and removed part of her pericardium, the sac that covers the heart, because it was dirty from exposure to the air.

“The only crack we have at complete repair is right off the bat,” Dunn said. “In the first 24 hours, the ribs are soft cartilage, then they become firm. If we had simply closed the skin and gone back later for other repairs, we would have had to use bone grafts.”

The cause of the defect is not known. Dunn said that most children with the condition also have other heart problems or require respirators, but Sarah’s chances are good because her heart appears normal.

Sarah’s mother, Hee Jin, is doing well. She has not seen Sarah since her birth, so the nurses took Polaroid pictures for the proud father to take home.
The last six days have left the Chungs, native Koreans, grateful – and astonished.

“I really didn’t imagine that such an operation could be done,” said Chung, a graduate student in political science at the University of Delaware. ”It looks like a miracle.”

Caption:

Copyright (c) 1983 Philadelphia Daily News
Record Number: 8301110848