Valentina Lopera Cuervo underwent heart surgery before she was even born. The fact sounds unusual. And it really is: it is the first success story in Latin America and the second in the world. The novel procedure was carried out by the Bolivarian University Clinic and the Cardio VID Clinic.
Valentina was able to form normally in the womb, however, the doctors realized that she had a problem in her growing heart that compromised the normal function of oxygenation at birth, they explained from Cardio VID.
But the most complex thing was the surgery, a whole filigree process. To get to Valentina’s heart, the doctors had to remove her from the uterus, but keeping it connected to the placenta. Once that was done, which was not a minor procedure, with specialized equipment, his chest cavity was accessed.
When that was done, the atrial wall was perforated with the intention of installing a mesh, called sent, to connect two arteries. The problem that Valentina had, in very simple and colloquial terms, was that between these two arteries the blood did not flow correctly, as if there was a disconnection or blockage.
The purpose of the mesh was to unite the arteries and allow the correct flow of blood. As if that were not enough, the surgery had an additional difficulty. It turns out that placental flow support is short-lived. That is, the doctors might not take longer than necessary to perform the procedure, or the results might be fatal.
One of the doctors who took part in the surgery, Ancízar de la Peña, recounted how time was a challenge for the team: “It is not easy to predict how long we might maintain the placental circulation, because the natural thing is that when a baby is born the The placenta begins to detach from the uterus, so here we had to maintain that connection for as long as possible, the different specialists had to be synchronized and interact in an agile way. This surgery took a total of more than 3 hours, but the specific process of maintaining the placental circulation, following the birth of Valentina, took 27 minutes”.
Twenty specialists were involved in the complex process, including experts in obstetrics, pediatric cardiovascular and neonatal intensive care, obstetric and cardiovascular anesthesiologists, cardiovascular surgery, and pediatric interventional cardiologists.
“Valentina is currently on an outpatient basis, she is at home cared for by her mother and father. When we have these babies who have this type of palliation, we ask them to come in for weekly check-ups to look at heart rate and breathing parameters, we check how much oxygen they have in their blood, among other tests,” said Rafael Lince Varela, pediatric cardiologist hemodynamicist at the VID Cardio Clinic.
