Miracle Weekend: Sukhmani’s Story

WATCH: Sukhmani Sandhu is just 16-months-old and she’s already had a heart transplant. And as Elaine Yong tells us, that’s not even the most remarkable part of her story.

This weekend, Global BC will be telling the stories of children and their families who have been helped by BC Children’s Hospital as part of the special Miracle Weekend coverage.

Sukhmani Sandhu is one of them.

When she was just three months old, she ended up in B.C. Children’s Hospital with heart failure.

“Before I had no idea what is a heart transplant, what is a kidney transplant,” said her mother Gurjit.

To survive long enough for a donor heart, she needed a Berlin Heart – a mechanical pumping device that is designed to assist a patient’s existing heart.

But in the operating room, the team realized Sukhmani’s case was even more complicated.

“What we had to do is explant her native heart. We took it out and rebuilt the atria of her heart…and connected the Berlin Heart to the rebuilt upper chambers of her heart,” said Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi, a Cardiothoracic Surgeon at BC Children’s Hospital.

“At the end of the day, she didn’t actually have her own heart. She had the Berlin Heart, as a total artificial heart.”

Miracle Weekend 2015: How to watch and donate

The procedure had never been done in a baby, and the four months where Sukhmani used it was longer than any other previous case.

Eventually, she received a transplant, the third success pediatric heart transplant since the program was officially launched at BC Children’s in 2013. Sukhmani will need follow-up care for the rest of her life, but she’s back home.

“This is the miracle. It’s a miracle baby,” says Gurjit.

“For these kids, it’s life saving,” says Gandhi.

“For the families, it makes it a therapy that’s possible. There were times in the past when families couldn’t go, they couldn’t relocate, and therapy like a heart transplant wasn’t an option.”

– With files from Elaine Yong