Tiny babies in the safest hands

By REBECCA WALSH health reporter

When Blake Bennett was born he weighed just over 3 1/2 pounds (1.58kg) and his defective heart was half the size of a walnut.

Born six weeks premature, the identical twin is one of the smallest babies to have heart bypass surgery at Green Lane Hospital.

Surgeons waited four weeks for him to grow a little before performing the operation. As he went into the operating theatre his mother, Brenda, wondered if she was going to see him alive again.

"It was really hard watching the other babies coming up to the ward and going home," the Papatoetoe woman said.

"There was a chance we would never have got to bring him home. He's obviously a battler."

Blake is one of nine babies weighing less than 2kg to have heart bypass surgery at Green Lane since 1998. All nine have survived.

He was born with a hole in his heart and transposition of the greater arteries, a condition where the two arteries coming out of his heart - one goes to the body, the other to the lungs - were switched. That meant the blue blood (without oxygen) went out to his body and the red blood (with oxygen) was being pumped back to his lungs.

The 4 1/2-month-old, who also battled a bowel problem and blood poisoning, spent the first two months of his life in hospital. For parents Brenda and Craig, much of it was a blur. They also had to care for his twin Jayden, who was healthy after initial respiratory problems. But surgery on such small babies has not always been so successful.

Paediatric cardiologist Dr Kirsten Finucane, who operated on Blake, says surgeons used to try to avoid the heart bypass procedure on babies under 2kg because the operation is fiddly and technically difficult. Before 1995, about 50 per cent of the babies operated on died.

A heart bypass can be risky for a 2kg baby, who has about 160ml of blood in its body compared with five litres in a 70kg adult.

This means there is less blood to flow through the bypass pump - which does the job of the heart and lungs while surgeons operate on the heart - so more blood and other fluids have to be added to the circuit. If air gets into the circuit it can cause brain damage.

Dr Finucane says improvements in technology, coupled with specialist staff trained to look after tiny babies, have made a dramatic difference to outcomes.

The $30 million heart unit to be built at Starship children's hospital will provide further improvements. The operating theatre and intensive care unit will be next door to each other so small babies will not have to be moved too much.

As many babies needing heart surgery have other problems, safety will be improved with all specialised staff based at the new Grafton site.

Staff are expected to treat more than 1000 children with heart conditions each year and perform about 400 operations.

For Blake, the future is looking good. Apart from surgery to remove a colostomy bag, there is a 90 per cent chance he will not need another operation.

The appeal

* The Starship annual appeal for the heart unit, due to open in November, runs until August 22.

* Much of the $5.7 million funding target is for a $2.5 million bi-plane x-ray machine.

* A $3 Star Bear can be bought from any Warehouse branch.

* Donate online at the Starship website.