JUST LIKE THE GRINCH, HIS HEART GREW 3 SIZES
Houston surgeons fix boy’s birth defect, innovate new procedure
While many children pine over Santa Claus, 9-year-old Kingston Murriel’s favorite Christmas character is the Grinch for a reason close to his heart.
“He grew a heart just like I grew a heart,” Kingston said.
Like the Grinch — a grumpy, green, holiday-loathing character who learns the meaning of Christmas in Dr. Seuss’s book “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” — Kingston’s heart has grown three times its size. In Kingston’s case, it was with the help of Houston-based doctors.
Late last month, doctors at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital performed the fifth and presumably final surgery on Kingston’s heart to help it reach its normal size and function, and this month — just in time for Christmas — Kingston and his mom Elizabeth Foster, 39, are returning home.
The baseball-loving boy from Brandon, Miss., was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a defect in which a small and weakened left ventricle puts too much pressure on the right ventricle.
The birth defect, which can result in heart failure, affects one in 100 children across the world and hundreds within the United States each year. While many can live healthy lives, their abilities are often limited and their life expectancy shortened by the condition, said Jorge Salazar, a surgeon at the children’s hospital. In such cases, experts resort to a full heart transplant, but Salazar said he saw potential in Kingston’s little heart.
The doctor first met Foster after a routine ultrasound in the third trimester, four weeks before the boy’s birth in Mississippi. Kingston’s heart was difficult to see on the screen. It turned out half of his heart was too small; the other half was failing, said Dr. Avichal Aggarwal, a pediatric cardiologist and associate professor of pediatric cardiology with McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Foster was terrified.
“Our faith was so tested. … We stopped buying baby stuff. We stopped planning the nursery,” said Foster. But she was later comforted by Salazar’s belief that he could fix Kingston’s heart.
Salazar, who also works as a professor of cardiovascular surgery with McGovern Medical School, performed a ventricular
recruitment procedure when Kingston was 2 days old that increased blood flow to his heart and allowed it to eventually triple in size. The progress to full health and heart, however, hasn’t been easy.
Many of the doctors whom Foster consulted with disagreed with the plan to operate on Kingston because the research was so new, she said. All concurred, though, that if something wasn’t done, Kingston’s heart could fail. Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital is one of the few centers in the world that performs these procedures, Salazar said.
“I was taking a risk,” Foster said, but “I had to stand my ground and trust in Dr. Salazar’s work.”
As Kingston underwent a series of surgeries and long waiting periods, Foster used the story of the Grinch, whose heart tripled in size after learning the meaning of Christmas, to help Kingston understand the need for his operations. Kingston became a super fan, wearing Grinch costumes to school events and watching the movies on repeat.
“He’s always been a Grinch baby,” Foster said. “He sees the scars and knows why he had to have the heart surgery.”
And on Nov. 30, once Kingston’s heart was at its optimal size, Salazar performed Kingston’s fifth procedure — a complex biventricular repair, during which he created two functioning ventricles that will help Kingston avoid a heart transplant and live a normal life.
“It’s a Christmas miracle,” Salazar said, adding that the experience surrounding repairing Kingston’s heart is a gift that will keep on giving.
Since Kingston’s first operation, the hospital has treated 50 to 60 children with a similar heart defect, allowing doctors to learn the many possibilities of heart repair in children as young as newborns, Salazar said. Kingston’s case has also helped doctors develop a procedure that reduces the number of surgeries to one, which could help save families with children with similar heart defects more than $1 million in health care costs, Salazar said.
“We want to get the message out that it’s possible. The steps aren’t complicated. It’s just innovative and a different way of thinking,” Salazar said.
Weeks after his latest surgery and days away from returning home to Mississippi for Christmas, Kingston could be found buzzing through the hospital halls, striking ninja poses for the camera and aching to visit the nearest playground.
Foster, who had watched the Grinch film twice with Kingston that week, already had plans to throw a Grinch-themed party to celebrate his homecoming.
“I’m excited and overjoyed to have made it to this point,” Foster said.
Kingston agreed.
Of his new and improved — and bigger — heart, he says: “It feels perfect.”