Infant doing well after heart transplant

SEATTLE – The youngest and smallest person to receive a heart transplant in the Pacific Northwest is “doing just great,” his mother said Thursday.

Nathaniel Nightengale was just 12 days old and weighed just 7 1/2 pounds when he received his new heart in August at Children’s Hospital & Regional Medical Center.

“He’s a happy, active 3-month old,” said Felice Nightengale, 34, of Redmond, Wash.

“He’s making great strides at holding his head up. He really likes to have books read to him. He likes his little yellow duck.”

Nightengale said she and her husband, Tim, knew before Nathaniel was born that he had a congenital heart defect in which the left side of the heart did not pump correctly. They and the doctors at Children’s were planning to operate when he was born, but after birth it became clear that a transplant was his only option, she said.

The hospital said he was the first infant in the Northwest to use a heart-lung bypass machine before his transplant.

He was the second patient in the western United States to receive a heart of a different blood type.

The region’s first “mismatched transplant” was performed in June, also at Children’s Hospital.

Jackson Kohrs of Lynden received his new heart when he was 6 months old.

Children’s first mismatched heart transplant was the 15th in the United States and the first west of the Mississippi, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

These transplants can be done on infants up to a year old, before their immune systems mature and attack foreign tissue. Dr. Gordon Cohen, Children’s chief of pediatric cardiothoracic surgery, performed both operations.

Although the procedure was new to Children’s Hospital, Cohen had done the same surgery previously at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.

Michelle Vanderyacht, 18, said her son Jackson is exactly like any other healthy 11-month old, except for the medication he must take three times a day.

“He is the most outgoing baby and well tempered,” Vanderyacht said.

“He loves to eat and you can tell. He’s starting to put on a belly and get some rolls, finally.”

She said she and Jackson’s father, Brian Kohrs, knew when she was 20 weeks into her pregnancy that their son would be born with a heart defect — hypoplastic left-heart syndrome, in which the left ventricle does not pump correctly.

The doctors hoped his heart could be repaired if he survived until birth, but after one surgery they knew he would need a transplant, she said.

Jackson waited four months for his new heart.

“I was nervous and scared, but I was confident he was going to do well. He was healthy going into the surgery. The only thing was his heart,” Vanderyacht said.

Jackson is now scooting backward and rolling and can take a few steps with assistance.

“I think he’s going to skip the crawling,” she said.

“If you looked at him you would think he never had anything wrong.”