Transplant Gives Hope to Baby’s Parents : Health: For Mary and Len Krugler, weeks of waiting end when a donor is found--just as their critically ill son’s heart fails.

Cardiac care nurse Mary Krugler has seen plenty of patients loaded onto gurneys, heading into surgery. But Tuesday, doctors wheeled tiny, 3-week-old baby Matthew into the operating room for a heart transplant and there was one big difference: This was Krugler’s only son.

Len and Mary Krugler, who conceived after Mary had spent 12 years trying to get pregnant, spent the early morning hours Tuesday at the side of their baby, who was born with a fatal heart ailment. After waiting 20 days for another heart to become available, they wanted to memorize every glance, every expression before Matthew was dispatched to surgery at Loma Linda University Medical Center.

Only moments after a new heart arrived from across the country, Matthew’s own heart stopped beating, lending even greater urgency to the operation.

“This baby was pretty sick,” said Dr. Steven Gundry, the surgeon who operated on Matthew and head of Loma Linda’s division of cardiothoracic surgery.

On Monday evening, Gundry flew from California to the East Coast, where he operated on a dead child, removing its healthy heart and carefully packing the organ in an ice chest. There it would remain for seven hours before being transplanted into Matthew, officially known as Baby No. 187. Gundry, who has performed almost 200 transplant operations, could not sleep aboard the plane.

Surgery began at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.

With her professional training, Mary Krugler knew exactly what was happening. She knew the possible pitfalls: Would the heart arrive in good shape after a coast-to-coast journey? (Some facilities will not perform transplant surgery if the heart has been out of a body more than four hours.) Would Matthew, whose own heart had stopped, be strong enough? Would Matthew’s body fight and reject the new heart?

It was one more chapter of agony, of waiting to learn if their son would live or die. As the doctors wheeled Matthew away, the La Canada couple clutched a mental image of their tiny infant, particularly of the way he looked during the last three days. Matthew had been alert, his eyes opened wide; when his parents spoke, he looked at them with the serious gaze of a child much older.

“He was looking at us; he was waking to our voices,” said Krugler, 41. “Those pictures I kept in my head when he was in surgery. It was really important, I felt that I stayed in touch.”

Two hours later, Gundry completed surgery, connecting the new heart to Matthew’s feeble body. The organ immediately began to pump. And Matthew seemed healthier already.

“It’s the nice thing about being a baby; their functions do come back,” Gundry said. “They just need a good pump.”

The surgeon was thrilled.

“I haven’t lost the excitement,” he said. ‘It’s exciting to feel a limp piece of gray muscle in a bag and see it turn red and take over.”

In the early afternoon, nurses told the Kruglers the good news: The heart had been successfully transplanted into Matthew. The operation, which was performed on infants 15 times at Loma Linda last year, gave the infant his only chance for a healthy life.

The Kruglers wanted only to see their baby, still sleeping and beginning to wiggle on his warming bed. With tears in her eyes, Mary Krugler had only one message she wanted to tell her son.

“I’m going to tell him how much I love him,” she said, minutes before she visited Matthew.

Since Matthew’s birth, the Kruglers had been battered by emotional dips and dives.

First there was the shattering news the day after Matthew was born that he had a rare, fatal condition, known as Shones’ complex, in which the left side of his heart was not pumping blood to his body.

Then there was the terrible waiting for a heart to become available, knowing full well that the longer Matthew waited, the less likely he would live.

“I’m just very glad this part is over and we are on to (the) next,” Mary Krugler said. “Now we are on to a better stage.”

The odds of survival are in Matthew’s favor. Since Baby Moses, a 4-day-old baby who received a new heart 10 years ago, 78% of babies operated on at Loma Linda have lived, said spokeswoman Anita Rockwell.

Doctors will carefully watch Matthew over the next several weeks, looking for any sign that his body has rejected its new heart. His medication will be monitored and finely tuned in the hopes of bettering the chances that the new heart will be accepted.

On Tuesday, an exhausted Mary Krugler could once again begin to think about her son’s future, to believe he had one.

“Today, at last, was a good day,” she said.