A British boy of three had his chest left open for five days with his beating heart on view after a pioneering ten-hour operation to flip his heart around.
The parents of Carson Ayre, who was born with his heart back to front, kept a bedside vigil as surgeons waitedfor swelling on the organ to go down before closing his chest.
His mother Danicka, 27, and father Luke, 25, watched even filmed a video of Carson's heart beating.
Without the operation, the boy's extremely rare condition, known as transposition of the great arteries, would have resulted in heart failure.
His parents had feared it might be only a matter of time before they lost him. But a team of surgeons from around the UK were assembled at Glenfield Hospital, Leicester, to flip the organ three weeks ago and now Carson is back home.
Yesterday Mr Ayre, from Carlton, Nottingham, said: "We were very pessimistic about the entire situation. So to see him get through, no words can describe it.
"He's absolutely shocked us. He was out of hospital in two weeks when they said it would be a month."
The operation was led by Giles Peek who said: "There are 153 operations that we do and this is one of the rarest."
Remarkably, it was the third open heart operation Carson has undergone. He went under the knife just weeks after he was born and had a pacemaker fitted when he was nine months.
