The bad news came
In October 1984, Teresa gave birth to her daughter three weeks in advance and named her Stephanie Fey Poklay. But before she could share her joy with her family and friends around her, she first learned the bad news from the doctor. She was told that the premature baby, Xiao Fei, suffered from , left heart incomplete development syndrome, .
This is an extremely rare congenital heart disease . Generally, the human heart has four cavitys, and the left and right hearts have two cavitys of atria and ventricles, which can play the role of pumping blood. However, children with incomplete development of the left heart will have poor development of the left atrium and left ventricle, resulting in the left heart system being unable to pump blood into the lungs and the whole body, and can only rely on the right heart to complete it alone.
What's more terrifying is that if the channels between the left and right heart systems of the sick young child are closed, the right heart system will not be able to pump blood into the systemic circulation on the aortic side, and the child will die within hours or days after birth because of acute left heart failure .
This news is undoubtedly a bolt from the blue for Teresa. She could not imagine that her daughter, who was still sleeping in her arms, would soon be killed by a congenital heart disease. Destiny is so unfair to the mother and daughter. But Theresa did not want to give up. She took her daughter to the Lomalinda University Hospital with better medical conditions, hoping that a doctor would tell her that Little Fei's disease still has a chance to be cured.
Crazy baboon heart transplant
Finally, when Teresa was most helpless, a phone call from Lomalinda Medical Center rekindled their hope.
The other party told her that they had started xenograft research since 1976, and the surgeon Leonard Bailey, who has successfully performed transplant operations on many animals, believes that it is possible to try to transplant the baboon's heart to Little Fei.
This made Theresa very hesitant because there was no guarantee for this operation except for the doctor's transplant experience. In this experiment, there has never been any precedent for transplanting animal organs into the human body. That is to say, her daughter will become the first subject of the experiment, and she does not know what the probability of the operation being successful is. Moreover, transplanting the baboon's heart to the human body is simply a moral and ethical thing!
But looking at her shortness of breathing daughter, she had no choice. In the eyes of others, such a ridiculous thing is the only life-saving straw in Teresa's opinion. No matter how low the success rate is, her newborn daughter cannot die in pain. So she made a bold decision and agreed to transplant the heart from the baboon into her daughter's body.
How to choose a healthy heart
Heart transplant surgery is divided into two types:
The first homogeneous transplant, simply put, the organ supplier and donor are both humans, or both parties are an animal of the same species, which is also the case with the most clinical transplants at present.
And the second xenograft is a transplant between different species. This is the case with Little Fei, because they cannot use the hearts of human children to transplant Little Fei, which will only kill another innocent life. Therefore, Dr. Bailey targeted the primate baboon.
He believes that baboons and humans have higher genetic similarity, and the size of the baby baboon is comparable to that of human babies, and the heart size will be closer and more in line with the transplant conditions.
After layers of screening, Dr. Bailey found 6 female baboons with a size that was not much different from human babies, and inspected and tested them in various indicators, leaving behind a baby baboon with the best transplant conditions.
Before the operation began, Theresa became more and more nervous, and even doubted whether her choice was correct. She didn't know if she could see a daughter who could breathe once she was pushing into the operating room.
But at this time, the daughter's breathing became increasingly difficult, and the transplant operation was urgent. Little Fei, who was only 12 days old, was pushed onto the operating table.After more than ten hours of long waiting, the nervous baboon heart transplant operation was successfully completed, and Little Fei's heart finally began to beat again!
fatal rejection reaction
Although the heart transplant surgery is progressing very smoothly, Xiao Fei also faces a huge life-and-death test - The body cannot produce rejection reaction .
Because the transplanted heart is an alien "foreign object", the human immune system will destroy and remove this "foreign object" after identification. In the short period of time after the operation, the risk of organ rejection reactions is extremely high, and this young life may be taken away at any time. But in the face of this situation, the doctor was powerless and could only pray that her body would not have any rejection reactions.
In the following days, Little Fei's wound healed well, and even in a few days of observation, there was no infection, which made everyone very excited. As long as the operation is successful, it will not only save Xiao Fei's life, but also prove that xenograft surgery is correct, which will become a turning point in changing human organ transplant technology!
But the previous xenograft surgery was destined to be difficult. Just as everyone was happy for Little Fei, she suddenly experienced a loss of appetite and mild shortness of breath.
At this time, everyone realized that the young Fei could not bear the heart in the end, and the immune system in the body still had a serious rejection reaction. immune cell began to attack this intact heart.
Although Dr. Bailey and many medical staff tried their best to rescue him, he still failed to save the young life. On the 21st day after the operation, Fei completely passed away due to heart failure.
Progress in xenograft
On the second day after Little Fei's death, Dr. Bailey held a press conference, and he expressed regret and regret for the operation. This also made the transplant experiment that was not favored and was once again cursed by people, and people accused him of his irresponsibility and perverted psychology. overnight, Dr. Bailey once again became a sinner for the eternal period.
But as a mother, Teresa, although the result of this operation was not good, she did not regret it. At least this operation still allowed her daughter to accompany her for more than 20 days with a "healthy" body. If she made another choice, perhaps she would still choose to perform the operation, because nothing is more important than her daughter's life.
Although Theresa did not blame Dr. Bailey, Fei's departure always laid deep regret in his heart. He looked through a large amount of relevant information and finally found the fatal cause of Fei's death - blood type does not match .
He found that Xiao Fei's blood type is O type , while baboon type AB type. It is precisely because of the mismatch of blood types that Fei quickly produces rejected antibodies in his body. Although the operation failed, it still provides valuable experience for studying xenograft surgery and avoids more deaths from transplants in the future.
After discovering the cause, Dr. Bailey confessed his mistakes and began to study this issue, striving to find a transplant method that meets the transplant conditions but does not produce rejection reactions and improves postoperative survival.
In the following years, Dr. Bailey and his team continued to overcome difficulties and summarized their experiences in hundreds of surgeries. Lomalinda University Medical Center has also become the world's leading children's heart transplant center in more than 20 years of hard work, using xenograft technology to save countless sick babies.
To this day, xenograft technology is still controversial. Although xenograft technology can enable countless seriously ill patients to receive timely treatment, it is still contrary to moral ethics.
Which one should I choose between human life and moral ethics? Perhaps we can only make this choice after we are truly parents!
