Newborn Wins a Second Chance : Transplants: Only 5 weeks old, Jonathan Laszlo Mark already was running out of time. But a heart transplant Wednesday is the first step toward the Redondo Beach infant’s recovery.

Jonathan Laszlo Mark was supposed to be home for Christmas, sleeping in the wooden crib in corner of his parents’ Redondo Beach apartment.

But the crib sits empty, heaped with stuffed animals that 5-week-old Jonathan has never seen, while his parents hold vigil at Loma Linda University Medical Center hoping that surgeons can give their son a new chance at life.

Wednesday afternoon, doctors started a delicate four-hour surgery to replace the boy’s ailing heart with a new organ from an unnamed donor. He joined 123 other infants, all under 6 months old, who have received heart transplants at the medical center since the infant transplant program began there in November, 1985.

Of those children, 101 have survived, an 82% success rate. Officials said the first few weeks after the transplant will be critical for Jonathan as his body learns to accept the new heart.

The boy’s parents, Kevin and Eva Mark, both 26, learned early Wednesday that a donor heart had been located. It was the first good news since the birth of their child. The first-time parents had feared that Jonathan would not live long enough for a heart to be found.

At the San Bernardino County hospital Wednesday night, the couple appeared weary, as their child underwent surgery.

“We’re happy; we’re relieved; we’re scared to death,” said Eva Mark. “He could reject the heart. There are a million things that could go wrong.”

Her husband, hoping for the best, added that at least “we are in the homestretch.”

While the couple waited in the hospital lobby, a woman whose own son underwent a successful heart transplant Dec. 19 offered her encouragement to the Marks, telling them not to lose faith.

“It is so exciting when they come out,” said Renee Holdridge of Westchester. “They’re really pink and beautiful.”

At about 7 p.m. Wednesday, hospital spokesman Dick Schaefer told the couple of Jonathan’s surgery: “His heart is in, it’s working, he’s off the (heart/lung) machine, and he’s on his own.” The couple embraced and their eyes filled with tears.

Kevin Mark said a few minutes later that he just wanted to get his son home to “be able to hold him, feed him, change his diaper.”

The baby was expected to remain in surgery for another hour or more, officials said at the time.

The tense wait at the hospital was not what the Marks envisioned when their son was born Dec. 16. But just one day later, Jonathan’s heart was discovered to be so weak and flawed that he would live only a few months without a transplant.

Weighing 6 pounds, 12 1/2 ounces, Jonathan was born at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena after what his mother described as a normal pregnancy. But when a nurse at Huntington detected a heart irregularity, he was tested and found to have hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition in which the left side of the heart is so underdeveloped that the flow of blood is impeded.

The condition is normally fatal within weeks, although one baby lived nearly four months before receiving a successful heart transplant, said Anita Rockwell, spokeswoman at the Loma Linda center, where Jonathan was moved last week to await a heart.

He has been kept in the neonatal intensive-care unit, where all visitors but his parents have been barred. Since Jonathan’s hospitalization, his parents have driven daily from Redondo Beach to Loma Linda, 80 miles each way, to visit their son.

“We’ve put a little more than 1,000 miles on our car this week,” Kevin Mark said.

The infant’s father, a retail sales manager at a Beverly Hills men’s clothier, said they have been searching for an apartment close to the hospital to be closer to their son. His wife is on leave from her job at a Torrance travel agency.

Before Jonathan’s birth, the Marks said they were not aware of heart transplants in children so young. But in the past five weeks, they have learned quickly about the procedure, which can cost between $150,000 and $250,000. Most of the cost will be covered through Eva Mark’s health insurance plan, the couple said.

During a Tuesday evening interview at their Redondo Beach home, the couple reported that their son is paler than most babies.

“He’s deteriorating daily. Every child is, in this condition,” Kevin Mark said.

Dr. Steven R. Gundry, one of three heart-transplant surgeons at Loma Linda, said that babies with hypoplastic left heart syndrome used to die within a few weeks of birth, but now can be kept alive longer as they await transplants.

Meanwhile, infant heart transplants are growing more common, with about 10 hospitals nationwide doing them on a consistent basis, Gundry said.

But the number of heart donors is not keeping pace, Gundry said, extending the waiting period for those who need hearts from about two weeks a few years ago to six weeks in the last year.

For babies such as Jonathan, that means the time span in which a heart transplant can be performed is getting shorter.

“It’s harder and harder to find a donor within that limit,” Gundry said. “We know there are plenty of children and babies who die that could be donors.” But at the time of an infant’s death, he said, relatives often do not know that “something good can be turned out of that loss.”

As the Marks waited for a donor heart, they eventually decided to go public with their plight, sending letters to television stations and newspapers, hoping to generate enough publicity that potential donors would come forward.

“If more people were told about it, I think more people would donate,” Kevin said. A hospital spokesman said later that the Marks’ publicity probably did not lead to the donor heart for Jonathan. He said it was not hospital policy to name the donor or the circumstances of how the donor died.

On Monday, the Marks found themselves staring into a firing line of television cameras on a hospital lawn at Loma Linda.

As she talked, Eva Marks clutched a pastel-colored baby photograph album that holds the few photos taken of Jonathan, all of them shot in hospital wards.

“Do you have any photos outside the hospital environment?” they were asked.

“He’s never been outside,” she said.