A year after the first total artificial heart implant was completed, Mariam Tannous’s family and her team of doctors at Sick Kids Hospital share their experience
At 11 years old, Mariam Tannous has experienced many uncommon things for someone her age. She has undergone multiple open-heart surgeries – two of which resulted in a heart transplant – and, just last year, became both one of the youngest patients in the world and the first child in Canada to receive a fully artificial heart.
So-called total artificial hearts like Mariam’s are not replacements for normal hearts. Rather, such devices are seen as a type of “bridge” therapy for patients who require heart transplants but are not candidates for one, either due to a lack of donors or because they are simply not healthy enough to undergo a transplant.
“Either we gave up and let it be, or we had to do something,” said Dr. Honjo, adding that his team accepted the challenge of the procedure while knowing that her two previous procedures would mean they would be contending with an already fragile body.“We were anticipating that this operation was going to be very difficult because we knew that, inside the chest, it was going to be really messy.”
Despite the complexity of the operation, Dr. Honjo said the main problem that occurred during the surgery was the actual size of the device. Since it only came in two sizes, both of which were too big for Mariam’s body, the surgical team were unable to close Mariam’s chest for five days following the surgery until her swelling subsided.
When Mariam eventually awoke from the operation, two tubes ran from the device inside of her body out of two holes in her abdomen to a piece of large external machinery that regulated her heart’s rhythm and allowed the device to replace the functionality of her two ventricles.Just over two months later, on September 19, Mariam underwent her fourth open-heart surgery and received her second heart transplant – the same one beating inside of her today.“She goes to school in person after all this.
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