With every beat of his new heart and every breath that flows into his new lungs, 8-month-old Jack Palmer is rewriting what's possible for babies with severe birth defects.
"Baby Jack" is a marvel of modern medicine and moxie after becoming one of the youngest people to have a heart-lung transplant. There is no medical textbook for this and no telling what his future will bring. But the boy who wasn't expected to live more than a few days after birth is used to beating long odds.
"We just live each day as if it might be our last and we don't know what tomorrow brings," his mom, Tiffany Palmer, said. "We cherish every moment."
Jack was born Jan. 16 with an underdeveloped heart and damaged lungs. Many babies in his condition don't even make it to birth, much less live outside the womb. But surgeons at St. Louis Children's Hospital agreed to try the double transplant — a Hail Mary pass of a procedure that only 19 others younger than 1 have had.
His father, Chuck Palmer, is an air ambulance paramedic, and Tiffany is a neonatal intensive care nurse, so they understood it was a long shot. But they also knew it was Jack's only shot.
"Walking into that unit that day the entire staff was just ecstatic because Jack was up for a transplant and they had accepted organs," Chuck said. "[But] we didn't know if it was going to be our last day with him or if it was going to be a miracle that day."
Cardiothoracic surgeon Pirooz Eghtesady had done heart-lung transplants before, but never on someone Jack's age. Jack also needed a reconstruction of the arch where his aorta, a major artery, connected to his heart. Eghtesady had done that complex procedure before, but never in combination with a heart-lung transplant.
"I knew it was a high-risk operation, but at the same time the flip side of it was pretty obvious too," Eghtesady said. "Meaning that if we didn't operate on him, if we didn't do something, he wasn't going to live."
