But a pioneering little five-pound baby girl changed all of that forever. She didn’t aspire to fame. The tiny, dark-haired baby girl mostly just gulped down formula and slept. She didn’t know that the whole world hung on her every breath for those 21 days in the fall of 1984.Little Stephanie Fae Beauclair, known to the world at the time only as “Baby Fae” broke the world’s heart when she died at the age of thirty-two days.
You see, little “Baby Fae” was born with hypoplastic left-heart syndrome.That meant that the left side of the heart, including its main pumping chamber, the left ventricle, and the aorta, is seriously underdeveloped. In her case, doctors said, the left side of the organ was virtually nonexistent.
When this rare birth defect occurred (approximately one in 12,0000 births), parents were told it was lethal and they had two choices. They could leave the damaged baby there in the hospital to die, or they could take it home and watch it die.
That was it.
Babies with this type of defect just didn’t live past a week or two.
But in 1984, amidst quite an uproar among millions of people who had opinions on the topic, Dr. Leonard Bailey and a team of doctors performed a very controversial transplant that made world-wide news.
News teams from around the world camped outside the hospital doors for weeks hanging on every breath that little girl took.
Why? Because whereas a heart transplant might save her little life, infant organ donors were virtually nonexistent.
So seven years before she was born, Dr. Bailey began investigating the possibility of using the heart of another species.
He spent those seven years performing over 150 transplants in goat, sheep and baboons, many of them between species. He brought his proposal to the review board at Loma Linda, and in December of 1983 (just as my own first baby, Nick, was born), they gave him preliminary approval for the controversial procedure.
And only two days before “Baby Fae” received her baboon heart, they gave him final approval.
When new cameras showed the world their first glimpse of that little chest of hers, the news media had a field day. The little baby girl with the baboon heart led every news cast, headlined every newspaper, and was the topic of conversation on every radio station and every late night tv show.
Many saluted the pioneering procedure. Others vehemently denounced it. Everyone had an opinion and felt very strongly about it. Personally, it creeped me out. I mean, baboons are really ugly (if you don’t know them personally!)
But what mother would not go to the ends of the earth and the wildest unprecedented procedure to save their little baby?
Well, Dr. Bailey put that baboon heart in her chest and put Loma Linda University on the map. She lived only three weeks after the transplant and the world mourned when she breathed her last.
As Ansel Oliver wrote in the Adventist News Network last month, “The days of cross-species organ transplants are gone due to controversies over possible infections. But 25 years ago, that baboon-to-huma
n heart transplant paved the way for the world's first human-to-human heart transplant in a child a year later. Loma Linda University Medical Center is nearing its 500th successful case of pediatric heart transplants. One of those kids is even now in medical school.”So why am I writing about this in my blog tonight, you might ask. I have a good reason – other than pride in my alma mater.
On March 29, 1986, a full sixteen and a half months after “Baby Fae’s” death, I gave birth to a beautiful, dark-haired baby girl. Jennifer Catherine, I named her. Jennifer for my older sister, to whom I’d looked up as a child, and Catherine for my beautiful mother who died when I was so young.
After lots of reading and research, I learned that all the experts said the best way to encourage sibling fondness was to talk to the older sibling about the baby that was coming – tell him it’s going to be his baby and that he was going to be able to help take care of it and keep it safe. They even encouraged expectant mothers to give a baby doll to the older child before the baby sibling arrived and practice taking care of it and cuddling it, etc.
I hope Nick will forgive me if I tell you he had a baby doll when he was little. (He was 2 at the time.) But he learned from that doll to to share and nurture and be the most amazing big brother. He was so very protective of his little sisters when they were youngsters. He was always careful to hold their hands when we got out of the car, and didn’t like people getting too close to them.
So when his little baby sister, Jen, was one week old, it came time to bundle her up in the car and take her to the doctor for her first doctor baby visit. I explained it all to little Nicholas (or Nickel) as we called him back then, and strapped them both into their car seats.
“No!” the always mild mannered, compliant Nickel said. “I don’t want to.”
“But we have to,” I assured him gently. “When your baby is one week old you have to take her to the doctor so he can check her and be sure she is all right.”
“No!” he said more loudly. “I don’t want to take her to the doctor!”
“It’s okay, honey,” I assured him again. “He won’t give her shots or anything. He just wants to look in her ears and listen to her breathe and listen to her heart just to be sure everything is working right…” I continued to explain as we pulled out onto Broadway and headed toward the pediatrician’s office in Arcadia.
Suddenly, my poor, sweet, quiet Nickel in the back seat began to sniffle…and then cry…and then in quick progression to wail as though his heart was broken!
Stunned, and then devastated when I saw his little, distraught two-year-old face in the rear view mirror, I quickly pulled over to the side of the road.“Honey, what’s wrong?” I asked as I put the car into park.
“I don’t want the doctor to put a monkey heart in my baby like they do when they are one week old!” he wailed, tears streaming down his face and his nose beginning to run.I was speechless. It had been over a year since “Baby Fae” had been on every channel of the evening news. And I don't remember having spoken about her since that November day 16 months earlier when she died.
But somehow my sweet little Nickel, just a year old at the time, had incredibly heard and understood enough of the “Baby Fae” broadcasts at the time to make the connection to his little baby girl going to the doctor for her check up – which in his little mind, included the transplanting of a baboon heart!
Tears filled my eyes at the horror on his frightened little face, and it took quite a while to calm him down and reassure him that our baby’s heart was fine and she wouldn’t need a monkey heart. And only then did we continue on to the doctor’s office.
My kids didn’t understand my ‘over-protectedness’ while they were growing up or why I didn’t allow them to watch scary movies or play violent video games or even watch blow-‘em-up type tv shows.You just never know how scary or violent images can affect the mind – even when they are put there unintentionally. And that is why I find it so important to think carefully before you say or do something impulsively when you are angry. You never know what kind of damage you might do to someone who inadvertently overhears what you (or the evening newsman) have said. so I think it is so important to guard what goes into your mind (either by viewing or hearing or seeing it) to help guard what comes out of your mouth or thoughts.
Liz Carson Rosas
13 November 2009
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. -- Psalm 19:14
My mouth speaks what is true,
for my lips detest wickedness.
All the words of my mouth are just;
none of them is crooked or perverse. -- Proverbs 8:7 and 8
Above all else, guard your heart,
for it is the wellspring of life.
Put away perversity from your mouth;
keep corrupt talk far from your lips. -- Proverbs 5:23 and 24
PS – Nick also became extremely indignant, even irate, when he first looked at his baby sister’s photo album some time later and saw the photos her father took of her, just arrived, in the delivery room. The cord was still attached and her face still spotted with blood.
He clenched his fists and his face got really red and he shouted, “Who dipped my baby in ketchup?!!!”
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