Cardiac Kids takes time, care in saving young Jamaican lives
Published:Friday | January 19, 2024 | 12:08 AMChristopher Serju/Senior Gleaner Writer
The life-saving open-heart surgeries performed by Cardiac Kids Foundation of Florida at the Bustamante Hospital for Children since 2004 have been time-consuming but rewarding for Professor Jeffrey Jacobs and the medical teams which in the 16 missions to Jamaica over that time, have operated on at least 160 children.
The success of these operations is evident in the fulfilling lives their patients go on to lead, but the extensive pre-planning that goes into each mission is critical to the outcome.
On Wednesday, The Gleaner caught up with Jacobs, chief of cardiovascular surgery of the Andrews/Daicoff Cardiovascular Program at Johns Hopkins All Heart Institute, at the Bustamante Hospital for Children in St Andrew as he prepared for another round of operations and spoke about the nature of the surgeries to save 10 more young lives.
“Open-heart surgery on a child is always complex. There are a million things that can go wrong, and if you make a mistake in any little step, bad things will happen. So to do successful open-heart surgery you need surgeons, cardiologists, nurses, ICU (intensive care unit) doctors, and other professionals, and the team has to work together perfectly. The complexity is the need to have every single member of that team perform perfectly, and if one part doesn’t perform perfectly, it will all fall apart,” he explained.
“What is fascinating about this is we have surgeons from Jamaica working with surgeons from Florida and cardiologists from Jamaica working with cardiologists from Florida and an anaesthetist from Jamaica working with an anaesthetist from Florida, and everybody comes together with one goal: the goal of making the baby well.
“All of these children that we are operating on this week, without heart surgery, would die of their heart diseases in childhood. With surgery, if everything goes well, they’ll be able to live fairly normal lives, go to school, work and have children. These are true, real life-saving surgeries. There is no doubt without surgery, these children would not live. With the surgery, they recover, go home and do well.”
For this mission, the Florida team arrived on Sunday and met with their local counterparts from 11:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m., planning and strategising the different operations they would perform, starting the next day.
“Every Monday night at 9:00 p.m. our team has a Zoom call to plan this trip, and we plan it for a year, we raise money, we assemble the team and we communicate continuously with Nola Phillpotts-Brown (general manager of Chain of Hope) and with Dr Sherard Little (consultant cardiothoracic surgeon) to make sure that all the pieces are in place for a successful mission trip. We talk to all the patients and exchange information about their diagnosis and what operation they will need, and by the time we come down here, we know more or less what we are gonna operate on because we have exchanged information before surgery,” Jacobs disclosed.
Some 200 to 300 babies are born in Jamaica each year needing heart surgery and Jacobs noted that some die before they get surgery while others who survive without surgery are sickly throughout their lives, unable to participate in the usual childhood activities.
“They either get their surgery in time or they die,” he declared. “Some babies with holes in the heart die before they have their surgery, others live but they can’t keep up with their peers.”
He was happy to report that children the team had operated on only days before were already showing signs of progress.
“The children we operated yesterday and today, are actually walking around in the Intensive Care Unit now. So they are doing great, and our goal is to have nine or 10 children leave here with their hearts fixed so that they can lead normal lives. We have a beautiful four-year-old that we operated on, on Monday who has already gone for a walk down the hallway outside. So that’s what it’s all about.”
The Florida team, comprised entirely of professionals who had volunteered for the Jamaican mission also, were motivated to do so, according to Jacobs.
“We come because we have a love for Jamaica, and we have a love for the children. That’s why we come back every year... it’s tremendous fun. It’s a wonderful feeling to operate on the children, but also, it’s just nice to be in Jamaica. You have a beautiful country.”