8-Month-Old With Rare Condition Gets Heart Transplant After Spending 7 Months In Hospital

An infant girl, who was in a Chicago hospital for the past seven months with a rare heart condition, has successfully completed a heart transplant surgery.

Elodie Baker, from Minnesota, was diagnosed with a rare heart disease called dilated cardiomyopathy when she was just two months old.

She was admitted to the Heart Center at Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago and was on the waitlist for a heart transplant. After spending 218 days in the hospital, the now-8-month-old baby girl finally underwent the surgery on March 27, reported USA Today.

Dilated cardiomyopathy is a condition that causes the dilation of the heart muscle, resulting in enlarging of a heart chamber. The condition leads to possible heart failure as it weakens the heart muscles and prevents them from contracting normally, causing difficulty in pumping blood.

The shocking diagnosis was made last August when Elodie's parents took her to an emergency room in Minnesota after the baby started crying profusely and stopped feeding. Though the doctors initially did not see anything wrong with Elodie, a chest x-ray revealed that her heart was enlarged.

Elodie was initially admitted to a hospital in Minneapolis and was later shifted to the Chicago hospital, ABC News reported.

"The fortitude and the strength that she's shown in the last seven months constantly amazes us. And we know that she's destined to do remarkable things," Kate Baker, Elodie's mother, told USA Today.

Elodie has recovered well after the transplant surgery and is currently under immunosuppression medications to prevent organ rejection.

"She's made incredible progress. Her new heart works really well; the squeeze is really strong," Dr. Anna Joong, one of Elodie's doctors said, adding she will soon be discharged from the hospital.

Elodie faced an "end-stage heart failure" while waiting for a donor heart to become available. The doctors surgically implanted a pediatric ventricular assist device to help her heart to pump blood as a way to bridge her to transplant, Dr. Joong said.

The doctor said such a long waiting period for a heart transplant is not uncommon in the U.S. and more than 50 infants are currently awaiting surgery in the country. "Especially for our younger children, we sometimes see that wait times can be quite long and can certainly be more than six months," Joong said, adding that organ donation is "the most incredible gift of life that a family can make."