Jack's Story
"I had a broken heart. They fixed it and now I have a special heart."
When Jack's mother was five months pregnant with him, Jack was diagnosed with a very rare and often deadly congenital heart defect in which the left side of the heart does not develop. Jack would be born with half a heart. But, at the time, his parents refused the advice of their doctors to give up on the pregnancy. Instead, they brought him to NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital, which has the highest survival rate for pediatric heart surgery in the tri-state area. “If our child was going to have a fighting chance, it was going to be here,” says his mom.
Jack went through a series of three very complex operations performed by Dr. Emile Bacha, the first of which was performed when he was just four days old. Each surgery carried significant risk of serious complications. However, Jack proved to be an incredibly resilient patient and the surgeries were enormously successful — Jack has been meeting all his developmental milestones.
“Our Jack did the opposite of everything they said would be typical — he rallied through.”
Today, Jack is an energetic young boy who plays baseball and runs around very fast. His favorite thing to do is “play with Mikey [his cousin].”