Ailing toddler living with her second heart transplant, Canada

The Montreal Gazette | Jodie Sinnema

Oksanah Watton cries in the arms of her mother Rebecca at University of Alberta Hospital on September 20, 2011. The baby has had four heart surgeries, including two heart transplants.

Photograph by: Larry Wong, Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON — Oksanah Watton isn't yet two years old, and she's already had three different hearts.

Her own had a serious defect, diagnosed when she was still in her mother's womb. The second, a transplanted organ she received Remembrance Day 2010, failed inexplicably.

The third is still beating inside her chest, and her family and doctors hope it will last a lot longer.

"This is very unusual," said -Oksanah's cardiologist, Dr. Simon Urschel, who hasn't had many patients who have needed two heart transplants at such a young age, especially when both replacement organs were in fantastic health. "It's very, very rare."

The little girl from Cold Lake, Alta., was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, where the left chamber of her heart wasn't working and the right chamber wasn't strong enough to take over.

"That just changed our whole world," Rebecca Watton, 35, said of her daughter's diagnosis.

Read more: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/health/Ailing+toddler+living+with+second+heart+transplant/5432599/story.html#ixzz1Yb4Ggxrq