Life of the Party : ‘Miracle Baby’ Survives Full Year

Baby Moses, the youngest heart transplant recipient ever, celebrated the first anniversary of that historic operation Thursday at a Loma Linda University Medical Center party attended by hundreds of relatives and well-wishers holding colored balloons and red carnations.

Also at the party were fellow baby heart transplant recipients known only by their first names, Eve, Rachel and Jesse. The “miracle babies,” flanked by their parents on a stage erected on the hospital lawn, dipped their fingers into cupcakes and smeared chocolate frosting on their faces as hospital officials hailed the event as a “celebration of life.”

“The very fact these four are here today is a minor miracle,” said Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, the pediatric heart surgeon who performed the transplants. The infants all had been born with a fatal defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome.

Bailey cradled Baby Moses in his arms and exclaimed, “One year today!” as news photographers jostled with one other in front of the stage.

The 42-year-old surgeon gained national prominence in October, 1984, when he implanted the heart of a baboon into a 2-week-old infant known as Baby Fae. The baby, who also suffered from hypoplastic left heart syndrome, died 21 days later.

In all, Bailey has performed seven infant-to-infant heart transplants on five infants and two toddlers. Three have died.

“What we have here are the first, second, third and fifth youngest babies in the world to get human heart transplants and survive,” said Dick Schaefer, hospital spokesman. Inspired by Loma Linda’s success, he added, “five other institutions have done this in the last year.”

But there was a bittersweet note to the affair.

Even as the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to Moses and his parents, Nicholas and Maria Anguiano of Barstow, another infant born with the fatal heart disease, Baby Kari, of Saskatoon, Canada, waited inside the hospital for the right heart donor to come along. Kari is 6 weeks old and “managing to hang on,” Bailey said.

Kari’s parents, Ken, 30, a corrections officer, and Linda, 28, a registered nurse, were among those cheering the celebrated babies. The couple, who declined to reveal their last name, brought their daughter here five weeks ago.

But the man of the hour was the little guy with a crew cut who kicked and squirmed in his mother’s lap as Bailey gave him a present from the hospital--a tiny lab coat emblazoned with the name “Baby Moses” and a red heart on the lapel.

On Nov. 20, 1985, Baby Moses became the youngest infant in the world to receive a new heart. Until then, only two such surgeries had been attempted--in New York in 1967 and London in 1984--and both patients died.

“My 3-day-old daughter, Amanda, passed away in 1984 from the same disease,” said Moses’ father, Nicholas Anguiano, 23, an Army specialist E-4 based at Ft. Irwin near Barstow. “We were told there was a 90% chance that it wouldn’t happen again.”

When it did, “I thought we would lose our son.” Now, he said, “we believe he will live to see his grandchildren.”

Meanwhile, Bailey said he expects to do more cross-species heart transplants of the kind he performed on Baby Fae.

“I think you can expect something like that sometime soon,” Bailey said. “If not as a permanent sort of thing, at least as a ‘bridge’ until we can find a human heart.”