Roee’s Broken Heart

While I was reading YNET this morning I came across a really heartwarming story about an infant with a weak heart.

The story was about the first artificial heart transplant in an infant in Israel, which was successfully performed at Tel Hashomer Hospital in Tel Aviv on a two year-old boy called Roee who suffers from heart failure since birth. What makes this yet another major achievement in Israeli medicine is that globally only some 20 such operations have been done…

A few days ago Roee’s condition started deteriorating rapidly. Doctors estimating that he had 24 to 48 hours to live, were left with no other option but to resort to a heart transplant. However, scarcity of transplants put the doctors before a vital dilemma: they would either have to risk Roee’s life waiting for a transplant that might arrive on time or might not, or dive into deep waters and transplant an artificial heart in the chest of little Roee, a procedure so far performed only on adults in Israel.

To make things worse, time was not on Roee’s side as his condition was deteriorating so fast that did not allow enough time to fly him to Germany where similar operations have been performed before.

The dice were cast and the operation would take place in Israel. A race against time began in order to receive the equipment on time from Germany and as Dr. Jacob Lavie, head of the transplant department at the Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer, recalls the operation had started while the equipment was still on its way from the airport.

The operation was successful, Roee is recovering and his mother is overjoyed as this gives her the hope she needed to wait for the real transplant.

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