The doctors of the Gaslini pediatric hospital in Genoa reconstructed the heart of a 21-month-old girl from Northern Italy suffering from a serious malformation from birth that in other hospitals had been considered incorrigible.
The possibility of a double heart-lung transplant was also rejected. Congenital heart disease was corrected, the girl was discharged with the prospect of a normal life.
At the small hospital in Bergamo, a pacemaker was also implanted in the perinatal period.
Since then its survival has always been linked to respiratory equipment: for the first two months of life it was dependent on mechanical ventilation, then on a non-invasive but continuous respiratory support, guaranteed by a device, and fed only with a tube gastric nose. The girl was suffering from a "left isomerism, atrio-ventricular canal and complete atrioventricular block".
It was operated by Dr. Giuseppe Pomè, director of the Gaslini Cardiac Surgery Unit. In October 2019, according to Gaslini, the child was discharged from the Center who followed her from birth with a report that "excluded, from the cardiological and cardiac surgery point of view, therapeutic spaces, if not as a supportive medical therapy". Another consultation, requested as a "second opinion" in March 2018, had given negative results, establishing that "there was also a contraindication to transplanting the heart lung block, due to technical problems and hypothetical pathology of the lymphatic vessels"