New heart gives little girl gift of a normal life
Baby Ruby was fussy. Within a day, she would be in two hospitals, then spend three months in ICU. She eventually left New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s with a new heart.
It all began the night of Sept. 4, when the adorable 3-month-old was not herself. Her mom, Ashley Cotter, 29, had an uncomplicated pregnancy and delivery. There was no reason to worry, at least no more than first-time parents do with an infant. That night, Ashley nursed Ruby and was concerned when the baby started dry heaving. With the 3 a.m. feeding, dad Brian, 36, noticed Ruby’s core was warm, but her limbs were cold.
“We didn’t know what that meant,” Ashley says. “I called the pediatrician, who said, ‘Don’t come to us. Go straight to the ER.’ ”
The family lives in Wading River, on Long Island’s North Shore, and by the time they arrived at Stony Brook University Hospital, Ruby had turned blue. Doctors “rushed us out of the room, and she wasn’t breathing,” recalls Ashley, who works for a pharmaceutical company. “They intubated her and did an echo on her heart. Everyone in the ER looked like they had seen a ghost.”
Those ER doctors knew baby Ruby had one chance: Get her to New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Washington Heights, which did the world’s first successful pediatric heart transplant in 1984.
Ruby had an enlarged heart.
She was put on medication, and when her heart rate shot up, doctors told the Cotters she needed a transplant. While they waited for a match, Ruby received a temporary mechanical heart.
Her condition was rare. “In the entire United States, there are about 500 transplants a year, and the majority of kids transplanted are in the adolescent age range,” says Ruby’s pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Irene Lytrivi. “It is a little more technically difficult in babies.”
New York-Presbyterian performed 32 heart transplants on pediatric patients in 2019, with Ruby’s finishing out the year.
For three months, Ruby’s parents stayed with her in the hospital.
“Even though it was a very horrible experience, we were fortunate,” Brian says, over the most welcome sounds of Ruby making noise. “Ruby has handled everything terrifically. A lot of children have had it way worse; she is crawling and standing.”
“She is a perfect example of a very unexpected outcome for a family,” Lytrivi says. “She is really the poster child for somebody who was very, very sick, but successfully went through all this intervention and is right now enjoying a pretty close to normal life.”
That normal meant Ruby celebrated her first birthday last Friday.