SAN ANTONIO -- A toddler from Mongolia got a life-saving surgery in San Antonio Friday. A non-profit group called HeartGift San Antonio made his trip and his incredible operation possible.
He’s only a year old, but Borhkuu Amralt has traveled halfway around the world. The baby from Mongolia was born with a congenital heart defect, a hole.
“Because of this hole, his heart works overtime and he has a daily competition between being able to breathe and being able to eat,” explained pediatric heart surgeon Dr. John Calhoon of the U.T. Health Science Center.
Holly McPherson is a volunteer who is opening up her San Antonio home as a host parent for Amralt. “It’s been such a blessing. I think the gift has been for us,” McPherson said. “His parents are not here. So I’m trying to be the mom that he doesn’t have and give all of my love and care and concern to him that his mom would.”
At CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital, Calhoon and his colleagues open up Amralt’s tiny chest. They put him on a heart/lung machine to keep him alive while they stop his heart to work on it. Using a piece of tissue from the sac around his heart, they patch the hole that would have shortened his life.
He’s taken off the machine, and his newly-mended heart starts beating again on its own.
In just two-and-a-half-hours, this child from a foreign country now has the chance for a long and health life. It’s a chance he would not have had without the help of CHRISTUS and caring medical professionals.
“It allows us one kid at a time to be an ambassador to the world,” Calhoon stated, “to tell the world America’s not as bad as people perceive us to be now. And it’ll change this child’s life.”
Amralt is the eighth child brought here by HeartGift San Antonio. The ninth patient, a boy from Iraq, is scheduled for his operation next month.
