Heartfelt Gratitude : Boy Thriving 5 Years After Transplant, Public’s Support

Five-year-old Robbie Shinn says he was born with a broken heart. “They had to put a new one inside,” he explains, pointing to his chest. “Then they zipped it right up.” He shrugs and stomps away in his pointy-toe cowboy boots, on the hunt for an afternoon snack.

That’s the kindergartner’s description of a heart transplant he received just 13 days after birth, a 1992 procedure that made headlines as thousands of Orange County residents were moved by the baby’s fight for life.

Five years later, the Shinn family remains grateful to the strangers who reached out with prayers, cards and gifts. Many dropped off money at the Westminster Police Department, where Robbie’s father, Charles Shinn, is a senior officer. In all, more than $30,000 rolled in to help the family with medical expenses.

On July 9, 1992, as Robbie’s tired heart was finally shutting down and doctors gave him less than 24 hours to live, a donor surfaced. Tim and Michelle Torgerson of Big Bend, Wis., had lost their 7-week-old son to sudden infant death syndrome. Grieving, the Torgersons decided to donate their baby’s organs. Their baby’s healthy heart, later described by doctors as a “perfect fit” for Robbie, was on its way.

“It wasn’t broken,” Robbie says of his new heart. He peers from behind round, gold-rimmed glasses and studies a photo album stuffed with pictures of himself. “It works pretty good.”

Good enough to help sprout little Robbie Shinn into a chatty, dark-haired boy who loves baseball and computers, scooting along on his police motorcycle and watching his baby movies for the umpteenth time.

So good, in fact, that the boy who quietly embraced his new heart and stole countless others is still doing both today.

“It hits me sometimes when I look at him, how amazing it all is,” says Robbie’s mother, Renee Shinn. “He’s just Robbie to us now. It’s easy to forget how far he’s come.”

His progress has not been without setbacks. Shortly after he was allowed to go home and after the constant tangle of reporters, cameras and well-wishers fell away, Robbie suffered a rejection episode. And another.

A span of nearly three problem-free years was interrupted around Halloween of last year, with Robbie’s worst rejection ever. The emergencies--caused by his body refusing to fully accept the new heart--landed him back in the hospital with tubes and tapes and monitors all over again.

Doctors gave him steroids to jump-start his recovery and have since adjusted the dosages of eight medications that he takes twice a day.

He barely made it home in time for Christmas.

“It was so scary when it happened out of the blue like that,” Charles Shinn says. “We had sort of settled in as a family. It reminded us again how quickly things can change.”

Because the oldest living patient to receive a heart transplant as an infant is now 14 years old, the Shinns look carefully at Robbie’s future. They stretch every moment, every hug. They give Robbie healthy, daily doses of family time. And since the surgery, theirs is a larger family now.

In 1995, the Shinns adopted two sisters--children the couple refused to break up--and enveloped the girls into a home already full with a son from Charles Shinn’s first marriage and another son from Renee’s. They had Robbie together, before their first wedding anniversary.

“I like to say we have hers, his, ours and theirs,” Charles Shinn jokes. “Either way, it doesn’t matter. We have a family, and that will always come first.”

The seven-member Shinn family takes camping trips and throws elaborate birthday parties, fills scrapbooks with memories and goes to church. The children squabble and giggle and descend regularly on the refrigerator, which is plastered with their own art masterpieces, held there by pink magnets proclaiming what everyone in this house already knows: “Organ and tissue donors give life.”

Robbie is particularly fond of spreading that message. When he started his pre-kindergarten class at Bethany Christian Preschool this year, he seized the first Share Day as an opportunity to tell his story to a roomful of rapt children.

“I showed them my zipper,” Robbie says of the pink scar that divides his chest. “I think they thought it was OK.”