hi bill. if that is your real name. it s william actually. hmph! affordable, fast fedex ground. 8-year-old lindsay lou bingham is inside the operating room, where surgeons work to replace her failing heart. it s 4:50 a.m., doctors put her on a heart/lung bypass machine, and begin to remove her diseased heart. it s badly scarred and twice the size it should be. as they re finishing, a call to the operating room. they re going to be here in
if it got turned off, they would hook me up to a little thing-amajiggy. what else are we going to do now? wait until a heart comes, right? let s take a look, lie back. now the wait for a heart is soon an added urgency. how long could the heart pump hold out. because it was artificial it threw off little blood clots, which kept everyone watching, tense on edge. dr. david rosenthal is a cardiologist on the team treating the siblings. her lungs are over here, and this is her heart. her heart is much larger than it should be. how big should it be? we would expect it to fit in half the width of the lungs, it s closer to 2/3. so it s quite enlarged compared to what it should be. that s even with the berlin heart pump in place.
it was taken from the donor nearly four hours earlier. the team will use a defibrillator to spark lindsay s new heart back to life. immediately, it begins to pump. and soon finds its rhythm. it took a couple hours longer than i expected, but everything went very, very smoothly. after nearly eight months of waiting and hoping. lindsay has her new heart. the binghams have two daughters notice cardiovascular icu now, as they get the good news about lindsay, their blood pressure spikes about 13-year-old sierra. i d like to regroup with the whole team and see if we can come up with a treatment strategy for her. i guess i need to hear you say we have options. we do have options. we have options. i just need to hear that. your mind does weird things at 2:30 in the morning, and you have two kids in the icu, you
wake right up. and i ll feel better? yep. love you lindsay lou. my emotions are shot, i have no more tears left. as nurses watch over sierra, and the doctors prepare lindsay for transplant, jason and stacy are asked to pack up lindsay s room to make it available for another sick child. every time we look around, we can see the love of other people, like the big heart that the whole school signed and sent to her. the donor heart is being removed in a hospital in nevada. transplant surgeon olaf reinh t reinharts is watching the clock. from the time the heart gets taken out until the time it gets profused with blood again. in lindsay. it has to be kept as short as possible. what are you talking? five hours? we re talking a maximum of six hours. i d rather keep it shorter than that. a team has gone to the hospital where the donor is, to retrieve the heart.
lindsay s enlarged heart was very weak, pumping just 10% of what a heart should pump. that s where the berlin heart came in about. this has allowed her feelle thy enough, she s a regular 8-year-old girl. it s a false sense of security, because you forget she s on a pump that s keeping her heart going. when i stand up, you can feel it pumping. you can feel your heartbeating, but it s bet beating on the outside of your body. it s kind of scary. lindsay waited in the hospital for a heart, the rest of the family moved into the ronald mcdonald house across the street. lindsay s siblings enrolled in city schools, a world away from anything they knew before. my class and grade was 28 kids, so now my grade is 200