According to a 2024 U.S. News report, the University of Iowa Health Care Medical Center is in the top 10 percent of hospitals in the nation in specialties such as heart surgery, lung surgery, and orthopedics.
By the numbers alone, patients are in good hands, but a health crisis doesn’t discriminate by location. It frightens anyone not to have control over their future or their health.
But patients like eight-month-old Wesley Peterson, who started his year off receiving a new heart, exemplify how to face this overwhelming fear: taking it one smile at a time.
Wesley’s long medical journey began at four months old on a family trip to Utah. After simple symptoms including a rash and a fever, his parents, Spencer and Julia Peterson, began noticing more concerning signs, such as his fingers turning shades of purple and white.
Doctors in Utah began to find aneurysms everywhere in Wesley’s body. They then deduced that the four-month-old was suffering from polyarteritis nodosa, or PAN, an autoimmune disease that enlarged his coronary arteries, which soon developed clots. Essentially, Wesley was having a continuous heart attack.
His doctors decided to send Wesley to UI Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital, where his care team, consisting of Rabia Khan, Gary Beasley, and Michelle Staron-Ehlinger, began work immediately.
They first attempted to rid his clots through medication, which proved unsuccessful. Matters became frighteningly worse when Wesley’s heart stopped altogether.
“Once we got to Iowa, everything kind of just hit the fan,” Julia Peterson said.
Wesley’s care team performed CPR for 30 whole minutes before they were able to put him through extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO.
“ECMO is, of course, a great tool that we have and a life-saving measure, but it’s not something that we would want patients to be on for a long time because there are high risks associated with ECMO,” Khan said.
These high risks include long-term cognitive and neurological deficiencies. Wesley was able to avoid these, but the care team needed to find something to assist his heart while they thought of long-term solutions.
They decided to put Wesley in a ventricular assist device, or VAD, which helped to keep his blood pumping through a series of tubes.
Yuki Nakamura was tasked with performing the procedure that placed the VAD and, later, the transplant. Surprisingly, the VAD proved to be the most difficult step for Nakamura.
“I’m pretty sure VAD implantations in a patient one week after a myocardial infarction in such a small pediatric patient has never been done,” Nakamura said.
After calling fellow pediatric heart surgeons for their advice, Nakamura found the confidence to successfully implant the VAD.
While a VAD is usually reserved for the left side of the body, Wesley’s heart was in such critical condition that his care team surgically connected both sides.
“What is challenging for us in pediatrics is that a lot of the devices that we use are designed for adults, and we have to make them work for kids,” Beasley said. “You can imagine, the device designed for a grown person doesn’t necessarily fit into a four-month-old.”
The care team was able to put Wesley on a kid-friendly designed VAD called the Berlin Heart. For his first month on the device, Wesley was intubated in bed.
“We had to find new ways of comforting,” Julia Peterson said. “Instead of picking him up, the most I could do is have my arm under his head and just kind of hold him that way, even though he’d still be in bed.”
After a month, Wesley was able to be seated in a chair with the device. Julia and Spencer Peterson were grateful for the change.
“It had been over a month since we’d held him, and there was a point where we probably didn’t think we were going to get to hold him again,” Julia Peterson said.
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Whether he was being held by his parents or his care team, Wesley was all smiles.
“He was a fighter, and he definitely found ways to be happy, even with all the things that were going on,” Spencer Peterson said.
Now came the care team’s long-term solution: a heart transplant. While the Petersons kept their hopes tempered and expected the procedure to happen in March, UIHC was able to secure a heart in time for the holidays.
Nakamura was tasked with the transplant surgery that lasted close to 12 hours.
“Because of the disease, the PAN, his vessels were very abnormal and fragile, and during the surgery, the vessels actually started to get torn,” Nakamura said. “So, I had to do some extra steps to make sure that we did not have significant bleeding.”
Wesley’s transplant was a success.
“It’s crazy to me to see how much he really did need a new heart,” Julia Peterson said. “As happy as he was on the heart pump, he’s just 100 times more happy and energetic, and he’s just thriving with it. And it’s just incredible to see.”
Staron-Ehlinger was not only amazed at Wesley’s resilience throughout but his change in energy after the transplant.
“I mean, he’s just the happiest boy,” she said. “The minute he woke up mildly, like a little bit from sedation, he was smiling around his ET tube … This is the epitome of why we do what we do, is to work with families like this and see results like this.”
As for the future, Wesley will be on medications for the rest of his life to suppress his immune system from rejecting the new heart. Outside of medication, Wesley’s future is unrestricted.
“In a few years from now, if you were to go up to a playground where Wesley is running around playing, you wouldn’t be able to pick him out as the heart transplant kid from anybody else on that playground,” Beasley said.
For Spencer Peterson, Wesley’s health journey proved to be a new experience. As a UIHC medical student, he usually finds himself on the other side of the bed.
“I had already decided I wanted to go into pediatrics and work with kids, and seeing all the success and the impact that the care from Wesley’s team was able to make just solidified my choice of wanting to work with kids because I’ve seen how big of an impact it can make,” he said.