Teen With Mechanical Heart Pump Gets Transplant

HOUSTON - For most folks being "big hearted" is a wonderful virtue, but such is not the case for a young man from Edinburg, Texas.

The heart Frank De Santiago was born with swelled to twice it's normal size and would have killed him if not replaced.

Last week at Texas Children's Hospital, it was.

"Death, stroke, all those things just going through your mind. You don't know what you are feeling. You're like there and then you wake up," says Santiago, the sutures from his 9-hour transplant operation still fresh on his 16-year-old chest.

"I was grateful for it," he says of the donor heart beating in his chest.

His mother, Maria De Santiago is brimming with praise both for physicians and the divine force, she believes, guides them.

"God gave him the opportunity to live on," she says in Spanish.

A modern marvel of a gadget didn't hurt either. They call it the "Heart Mate II", an implanted mechanical pump which restored healthy blood flow to Frank's entire body after his enlarged heart started failing back in May.

Pediatric cardiologist Jeff Dreyer says the device did more than just buy his patient critical time.

"It actually improved the function of other organs in his body. His general health while on the pump improved considerably. That made surgery itself and his recovery much easier," explains Dr. Dreyer.

For Frank De Santiago, a life time filled with anti-rejection drugs seems a tiny burden to bare for the gift he's been given. His quiet joy is tinged with the sad understanding that somewhere, his heart donor's family still grieves.

"I'm just sorry for the loss. I would tell them I will take care of my heart, his heart," he said.

We are told the heart donor was 22 years old.

Dr. Dreyer says 75-percent of patients like Frank are still alive five years after their transplant.

The key to survival, he says, is absolute discipline when it comes to taking prescribed anti-rejection drugs.

Dreyer says it's a degree of discipline that some teens have difficulty adhering to.