Baby Thomas needs a new heart

By Carrie A. Mizell

Wyatt Thomas is a charmer.
As his many adopted ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles,’ who otherwise go by the name of doctors or nurses, can attest, Wyatt has a smile that lights up the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at Shands Hospital.
To look at the 8-month-old, one would never guess that the baby who loves to eat lollipops, watch the movie “Cars,” and ride his rocky horse, was born with extremely complicated heart problems.

In an effort to protect baby Wyatt from germs, visitors, including his parents,
Ann and Johnny Thomas wear protective gowns, masks,
and gloves when they enter his room in the Intensive Care Unit at Shands Hospital.

Wyatt’s parents, Johnny and Ann Thomas of north Gilchrist County, have been anxiously waiting for a match to be found so that Wyatt can have the heart transplant he needs to go home and live life outside the four walls of the PICU.
After a normal pregnancy, Ann Thomas delivered the couple’s 7 pound, 4 ounce baby on August 13, 2009. Initially, Wyatt seemed like a perfectly healthy baby. It wasn’t until the final physical he underwent before the Thomases were supposed to be discharged from Shands Hospital that the doctor noticed a heart abnormality.
Wyatt was taken for an echocardiogram to determine if, as the doctor suspected, it was nothing more than a heart murmur.

“Before we knew anything was wrong, Wyatt had been taken to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit,” Ann Thomas explained. “All I knew was that it was taking too long, so I headed toward the nursery and the doctor met us in the hall. We were told that if we would have left the hospital he would have never made it back alive.”
Wyatt was soon diagnosed with Truncus Arteriosus, a rare heart defect that occurs when the two large arteries carrying blood away from the heart don’t form properly and one large artery is present instead.
“The doctors told us there was no reason he should have been born alive,” Ann Thomas explained. “Truncus babies are usually delivered by C-section; but since we didn’t know he had heart problems, he was not. At all the sonograms he was wadded up so tightly that we could tell the heart was beating, but couldn’t see that there was a problem.”

Wyatt was just a month old when he got the Berlin Heart.

According to Dr. Mark Bleiweis, director of the congenital heart center at Shands Hospital, the fact that Wyatt was born with Mitral Valve Disease as well made his condition even more rare. Dr. Bleiweis told the Thomas family that Wyatt’s case was one of the worst he had ever seen.
Wyatt was just 6 days old when Dr. Bleiweis and a team performed their first operation to repair the Truncus Arteriosus. The surgery was deemed successful and Wyatt was sent home with his family two weeks after the procedure.
However, after just nine days at home the Thomases noticed that their baby was grunting a lot, retaining fluid, and not eating.
After a quick call to the doctor, Johnny and Ann rushed their baby back to Shands on September 30. A doctor met them in the hospital’s clinic, took one look at Wyatt, and called for a bed in the Intensive Care Unit.
“We had been at the hospital about 10 minutes when he coded,” Ann Thomas said.
The Thomases were told that their baby’s heart failure was so bad that his best chance for life would be a heart transplant. On October 20, Wyatt received the Berlin Heart.
Josh Campbell, RN, explained that the Berlin Heart functions as a normal heart would in that it has both a left and right chamber and is driven by a compressor.
“It’s amazing to see the state of Wyatt’s health before and now. Since he has received the Berlin Heart, he looks like a healthy kid.” Campbell said.
Wyatt was the fifth of seven children to be put on the Berlin Heart at Shands Hospital and the youngest child in the United States to use the device. Ann Thomas explained that one of the other children who received the Berlin Heart prior to getting a transplant happens to live within a mile of the Thomases’ home on State Road 47.
According to Dr. Bleiweis, the Berlin Heart has been approved in the United States but not sanctioned. The device has given Wyatt a good quality of life and as a result he is now growing and developing both physically and socially.
Between them, Johnny and Ann have seven children, including Wyatt. Two are grown and living on their own, but four children, ages 18, 16, 14, and 10 still live at home, which makes things difficult. While Johnny spends both days and nights with Wyatt at Shands, Ann goes back and forth between their home and the hospital trying to keep the family’s day-to-day life as normal as possible.
As Ann says, Wyatt gets held a lot and prefers to sleep with his head tucked up almost beneath his father’s underarm. With an apartment just three blocks from the hospital, Johnny is able to stay at the hospital most days from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
During the week, Ann helps the kids get ready and sends them off to Bell schools before heading to the hospital around 7:30 a.m. She spends most of the day at the hospital, but leaves around 2:30 p.m. to head home to greet her son when he gets off the school bus.
On the weekends both parents stay with Wyatt at the hospital, since Ann’s children spend that time with their father. While the Thomases strive to make their baby’s life as normal as possible, they struggle with the fact that Wyatt is growing up within the four walls of the intensive care unit.
“The most difficult part is that we’re in a waiting game hoping for a phone call saying that there is a match somewhere,” Ann Thomas said. “It’s hard knowing that another family will have to lose a child in order for our baby to get a heart.”
Through this experience, the Thomases have learned the importance of organ donation and as Ann said, they have seen children not make it while waiting for a transplant.
“You learn to just make the best of it,” Ann Thomas said.
Through it all, they have been encouraged by the love and support they have received from friends and family members, along with their church family, Mt. Horeb Baptist Church.
To show your love for the Thomas family during their time of need, call (386) 433-6054.