Looking back, looking forward. Last year’s health stories were a
mix of hope and struggle, of science and simplicity. Maggie, the
therapy dog, warmed hearts with her presence and rebounded from an
illness of her own. Angelina Sahin and her family endured her ordeal
coping with a congenital heart defect. Dr. Dario Altieri sees hope in
progress toward a novel drug to target cancer. And Worcester smokers
are encouraged to try to stop, even if they’ve failed before.
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Angelina Sahin knows the name of all her medications, when to
take them and what they’re for. She knows how to use a stethoscope and
the way to take blood pressure readings. She listens to hearts and
lungs.
Angelina is 2 years old and her patients are her dolls.
“She learned so much from being in the hospital,” her mother,
Angela Sahin of Worcester, said last week. “She’s very smart for her
age and very mature.”
Angelina was born with a congenital heart defect called
hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which means the left side of her heart
did not develop properly. She needed three operations to fashion a way
for her right ventricle to take over the left ventricles’ job of
pumping blood to the body.
The third of three surgeries was scheduled for last May, but
because Mrs. Sahin was pregnant and due to deliver in July, the date
was changed to March 30. That was a good thing, Mrs. Sahin said,
because Angelina ended up spending almost three months in Children’s
Hospital Boston, including nine weeks in intensive care. She and her
husband stayed in Boston, at first in the hospital and then in a nearby
residence for families of patients.
A week after her surgery, Angelina developed pneumonia and
later had leakage from one of the procedures done on her heart. She had
to be placed on life support in the form of extracorporeal membrane
oxygenation, or ECMO. The heart-lung bypass machine is like a big
dialysis machine, as Mrs. Sahin explains it. All the blood leaving the
body gets oxygenated and pumped back through the heart and lungs.
Angelina stayed on the ECMO for a week. During that week she
also needed a cardiac catheterization procedure to correct blood flow
in her heart, Mrs. Sahin said.
When she was finally strong enough to be taken off the ECMO,
she needed physical therapy to learn how to walk again. She came home
with a nasogastric tube for feeding because she refused to eat at
first.
Her little brother, Nasir, was born July 1. He does not have a
congenital heart defect, but in his short life he has also had to have
surgery. He was born with pyloric stenosis, a narrowing of the stomach
where it joins the small intestine. Complications kept him in the ICU
at UMass Memorial Medical Center for three weeks.
Mrs. Sahin has grown accustomed to the sophisticated medical
technology and terminology surrounding her daughter’s care. People
often think she’s a nurse, she said. She recently returned to work as a
Head Start home visitor, but thinks she’d like to go to nursing school
to become a registered nurse and work in an ICU.
She saw some heartrending things during Angelina’s hospital stay while she was six, then seven, then eight months pregnant.
“It was a lot to deal with,” she said. “You have no choice when
it’s your child. You just have this instinct, this drive to just keep
going. It’s the only way I can describe it.”
She thanks her family, friends and church — Belmont Street
A.M.E. Zion Church — for their help and prayers during the ordeal, as
well as the support group Friends with Heart. Angelina has been healthy
since she came home, having only a cold or two so far in the fall and
winter.
“Long term, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” her mother said. “We are blessed. She is a very special little girl.”
