200 Bid Final Farewell to ‘Miracle Baby,’ Victim of a Broken Heart

She was the little girl with the broken heart who seemed to touch the hearts of everyone she met.

Cherie Katharine Crane was called the “Miracle Baby” when twice in her first five months of life she underwent open heart surgery aimed at repairing a heart deformity called endocardial cushion defect. She had a third operation a year ago.

But on Valentine’s Day, the 6-year-old’s heart finally gave out.

About 200 of the North Hollywood girl’s friends and family gathered at her funeral Saturday to pledge that her memory will live forever in their hearts.

“What a tremendous impact she had on our lives,” said the Rev. Eugene Golay, pastor of the First United Methodist Church of North Hollywood.

“She was a delightful little girl. How patiently and sweetly she bore the months of surgery, all the machines, the medicines, the needles, the therapy. Every time she came back to us, she was her same vivacious self. Now she’s free.”

Cherie, a first-grader at Toluca Lake Elementary School, had been a candidate for heart transplant surgery at UCLA Medical Center when her condition began deteriorating three weeks ago. Until then, she had fought to lead a normal life, her friends recalled.

She danced to rock music videos and attended rock ‘n’ roll performances staged by her father, Stephen Crane, the 38-year-old singer-songwriter for the five-member band “Big Guns.”

A friend, Tom Barber, eulogized Cherie in a poem read during Saturday’s service. “You taught us how to enjoy the music,” he wrote. “Now we’re playing your song.”

“She loved her father’s music,” said Johnny Burnett, a guitarist with Crane’s band. “She’d tell us what we were doing wrong. She’d tell us when we weren’t singing a song right. There was always a lot of camaraderie--I think love kept her alive as much as the doctors did.”

Several of her doctors and nurses who attended Saturday’s service at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills agreed.

“Cherie was a child of the whole group,” said Dr. Ross Miller, a Childrens Hospital pediatrician who first attended to the girl when she suffered heart failure in 1982. “Her family and their friends were very strong. There was a lot of love there.”

Dr. Masato Takahashi, who performed all three of Cherie’s open heart operations, had tears in his eyes as he remembered her as “a shy, caring person and a very good patient.”

Takahashi, a pediatric cardiac specialist, had diagnosed Cherie’s condition when she was 3 days old. Her heart was then no bigger than a walnut and had not developed beyond that of a 30-day gestation embryo.

When she was 2 months old, Takahashi and a team of surgeons used a Dacron patch to create a wall that was missing between the two upper chambers of Cherie’s heart. They also constructed half of the wall that was missing between the lower chambers. The baby’s own tissue was used to construct a mitral valve.

When she was 5 months old, the mitral valve was leaking and Cherie became the youngest baby to receive an artificial valve at Childrens Hospital. A third operation to install a larger valve occurred on Feb. 15, 1988.

‘Went Into Tailspin Quickly’

“We had high hopes we could nurse along her heart,” Takahashi said Saturday. “Three weeks ago I decided a heart transplant was the only way to go. But she went into a tailspin quickly.

“She had such an influence on everybody at the hospital. When she finally passed away, there wasn’t a dry eye in the intensive care unit.”

Nurse Tish Schwinn said Cherie had helped establish a children’s videotape library for other young Childrens Hospital patients. She said the girl had fought hard, but “she was tired . . . she’s better off now.”

Patricia Crane, 33, said she will always picture her daughter the same way.

“That’s how I’ll remember her, as a fighter. I can’t be anything but happy for her. We’d sincerely exhausted all avenues.”

And there cannot be a better day “to remember someone you love so much” as Valentine’s Day, she said.

“She has a complete heart now . . . she received it on Valentine’s Day.”