Newborn baby girl at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford is first in Western U.S. to undergo bloodless open-heart surgery

[Hope]

http://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/about/news/releases/2018/newborn-girl-bloodless-open-heart-surgery?source=homepage#.Wn0Qe-80rHE.facebook

[Qapla]

A nice portion of the article to peak your interest:

 

Quote

The surgery, on October 31, was done in a 10-day-old baby girl born in Hemet, California with a serious congenital heart defect. Meticulous planning and execution of the surgery, an arterial switch procedure, allowed the medical team to surmount daunting technical challenges of treating a 7-pound open-heart patient without giving blood. It is the first bloodless open-heart surgery performed in an infant in the Western United States.

“If you can do surgery safely and effectively without transfusion, there are several medical benefits,” said Frank Hanley, MD, chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at the hospital’s Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center and one of two surgeons who performed the procedure. He said patients who do not receive blood products have fewer post-surgical complications, provided they do not lose too much blood. “You have to be able to do the surgery safely and not have the patient’s red blood cell count drop too low,” Hanley said.

 

Oh, and YES, the family is JW's

[Dages]

That's awesome !