Million dollar miracle
Published: July 10, 2007
It’s a day LaKisha Joseph and Alastair Thomas have ached for since the day their 16-month-old baby Alyssa was nearly taken from them.
“She was vomiting, and we took her to the emergency room and did all kinds of tests, and still nothing,” Joseph said from a conference room at All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg Monday.
“Eventually, her heart just stopped, and that’s when things just went downhill.”
For the next 52 minutes, emergency crews immediately performed CPR on Alyssa’s lifeless body.
Finally, she came back.
Doctors realized Alyssa didn’t have time to wait to for a new heart. Instead, they decided to outfit Alyssa with an experimental device called the Berlin Heart.
The Berlin Heart is manufactured in Germany, and it’s designed to help people with failed hearts survive while they wait for donors.
“For youngsters who are waiting for a pediatric heart transplant, it’s a very difficult proposition. They may have to wait a while for those heart transplants, and there’s not a whole lot that we can do to help them make it through to the time [when] the donor heart becomes available,” said Ann Miller of All Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Jeff Jacobs, Alyssa’s surgeon, describes how the Berlin Heart works.
“It pumps the blood for the ventricle, and then it’s pumped back into the heart. So it goes out of the heart, gets pumped and then goes right back into heart.”
Since the Berlin Heart hasn’t been approved by the FDA, doctors at All Children’s had to put in an application with the hospital and the Food and Drug Administration to be able to implant it.
A day later, their request was granted.
“[The FDA] understood the reason you need it so badly, so they fast-tracked it, and we got approval within 24 hours,” said Alyssa’s pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Alfred Asante-Korang.
The next step was getting in contact with Berlin Heart’s maker in Germany. The device arrived in St. Petersburg four days later, complete with its own staff.
Gary Carnes, President and CEO of All Children’s Health System, said the Berlin Heart itself cost more than $100,000.
The whole process, including the transplant operation and Alyssa’s recovery, will run well over $1 million.
Alyssa had the Berlin Heart for 75 days, until February 12, when she received a heart transplant.
Monday, she was released from All Children’s Hospital. She now heads to Tampa General Hospital for rehab.
Alyssa’s doctors expect her to able to return home to Orlando in a few weeks.
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