2-Year-Old Undergoes Transplant : Medicine: Hawaiian boy is transferred to Loma Linda hospital for surgery from Orange County after a heart donor is found.

A critically ill 2-year-old Hawaiian boy, brought to Orange County a week ago to await a heart donor, was undergoing a transplant late Saturday night at the Loma Linda University Medical Center in San Bernardino County.

Jason Jenette arrived at the hospital shortly after 6 p.m., several hours after officials at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, where he was being treated since his arrival from Hawaii last Sunday, and the boy’s parents were notified that a heart had been found from an unidentified source on the West Coast.

The procedure began about 9:30 p.m. and the boy was expected to remain in surgery about four hours. Dr. Anees Ruzzouk, one of Loma Linda’s three transplant surgeons, was scheduled to lead the operation.

“It was a very smooth transport,” said Bianca Tilling, a registered nurse who accompanied the child in an ambulance escorted by the California Highway Patrol. “He was stable when we arrived. He looked very good.”

Officials at Children’s Hospital said the boy’s parents, Jason and Darlene Pacheco, were “ecstatic” after learning that an organ had been located.

“They’ve been at the child’s bedside continuously,” hospital spokeswoman Andrea Pronk said of the boy’s parents. “Saturday afternoon, they went shopping at MainPlace Mall (in Santa Ana) and their beeper went off. They knew when it beeped that they had a heart.”

Pronk said the child was conscious when he was loaded into the ambulance for transfer to the medical center.

All the while, he was linked to the heart-lung bypass machine which has functioned as the youngster’s heart since he arrived in Orange County from Hawaii by a Coast Guard cargo plane. A regular commercial flight could not accommodate the bypass machine.

The apparatus was developed by Children’s Hospital of Orange County in the 1970s to take the place of an infant’s heart and lungs, taking stress off weakened organs.

The boy was born with a congenital heart defect, a disease that afflicts one in 6,000 babies.