Kevin Christensen: Braveheart

"One day he was a healthy 14-year-old wrestling for his school. The next he was in heart failure,” says Kim, Kevin’s mother. “Before we knew it, Kevin was so sick that he was being flown to Children’s Hospital for a transplant.”

Kim’s account is no exaggeration. Kevin wrestled with his team on Saturday and on Sunday, he couldn’t get out of bed. Suspecting the flu, he stayed home from school, but progressively got worse throughout the week. On Thursday, Kim took him to the family doctor who diagnosed Kevin with mononucleosis.

Kevin returned to the doctor's the following Monday, and he was so dehydrated that the nurse couldn’t draw blood. The doctor still thought he had mono, but Kim knew it had to be something worse. She took Kevin to their local emergency room. A chest X-ray was ordered and what showed up was one of the most frightening images Kim ever saw. “His heart was three times its normal size.”

The attending cardiologist referred Kevin to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC. Soon after Kevin’s arrival by medical jet transport, Steven Webber, MBChB, director of Pediatric Heart Transplantation and chief of the Division of Pediatric Cardiology at Children’s, registered him as a Status 1 candidate on the heart transplant waiting list.

“Kevin had severe weakening of the heart muscle (called cardiomyopathy), which was quickly leading to heart failure,” says Dr. Webber. Because waiting periods are unpredictable, Kevin’s team of cardiologists were concerned that he would die before a heart became available. Kevin’s doctors learned that a ventricular assist device could keep him alive while he was waiting.

By pumping blood through the body, a ventricular assist device helps the heart function until a donor heart is available. Children’s Hospital is one of few pediatric heart centers in the country that has the technology and expertise to implant the devices.

“After a day or two on an assist device,” says Dr. Griffith, director of Cardiothoracic Transplantation, “patients can improve to where their heart functions well enough for them to exercise.” Just a few days after Kevin received a right and left assist device, he was walking on a treadmill.

On March 14, the Christensens were notified that a heart was available. Kevin was prepared for surgery and received his new heart without complication. Unfortunately, Kevin’s great start to a speedy recovery abruptly ended.

Six days after surgery he began to experience stomach pain. Yuk Law, MD, pediatric cardiologist, examined him and started intravenous fluids. While Dr. Law was discussing Kevin’s condition with his mother, Kevin turned red and gasped for breath. He was having a heart attack.

Dr. Law began CPR and Ralph Siewers, MD, then chief of Pediatric Cardiology, performed emergency surgery. The doctors worked on Kevin for more than two hours, at times pumping his heart with their hands.

Kevin was put on a ventilator and an ECMO machine, which is used to oxygenate a patient’s blood when the heart and lungs cannot and is only used in critical situations. Fortunately, Kevin started to improve. He was removed from the ECMO machine the following Wednesday and from the ventilator a few days later.

Since a release from the hospital was in the near future, Dr. Webber ordered a round of tests. An MRI showed that solid scar tissue covered Kevin’s heart and was causing dangerously low blood pressure. Kevin was taken to an operating room where surgeons had to literally peel the tissue off his heart.

Since then, Kevin has recovered at his home. His feeding tube was removed that July and he rapidly gained back all the weight that he had lost. Today, Kevin is a healthy 18-year-old who has returned to wrestling.