Baby Moses to Undergo Minor Eye Operation

Baby Moses, the longest living infant heart transplant patient, is scheduled to undergo minor eye surgery today, but he is otherwise healthy nine months after receiving a donor heart, his mother said.

The surgery will loosen his eye muscles so that his vision can be straightened, Mrs. Nicholas Anguiano, of Rancho Cucamonga, said.

Anguiano, 22, said her son is cheerful and active. “He’ll stand on his feet and grab on to my legs, but mostly he likes to crawl on the floor,” she said. “He’s also trying to say something, though who knows what it is. He says ‘mama’ real good.”

The last time Baby Moses’s body attempted to reject his transplanted heart, a common complication after organ transplants, was two weeks ago. But he was treated successfully with medication, the mother said.

The name Baby Moses was invented to protect the baby’s identity by Loma Linda University Medical Center officials. The child was born last Nov. 16, and was discovered to have hypoplastic heart syndrome, a potentially fatal underdevelopment of the heart. Four days later, he received a transplanted human infant’s heart.

The surgery was performed by Dr. Leonard Bailey, who had made history a year earlier by transplanting a baboon’s heart into another infant, known as Baby Fae. That infant, who had the same condition as Moses, died 20 days after the transplant.

Before Baby Moses, no infant heart transplant patient had lived longer than 26 days. Since his operation, three other infants have received new hearts at Loma Linda and all are doing fine, according to the hospital.