When a Virus Attacks an 8-Year-Old's Heart, Doctors Use a VAD to Repair It

Samantha Schaller was a healthy, thriving 8-year-old girl until she came down with a virus that attacked her heart. Doctors diagnosed her with myocarditis, a condition that made the muscular walls of her heart inflamed. She needed surgery to repair it.

David Morales, MD, chief of cardiothoracic surgery in the Heart Institute at Cincinnati Children's, explained to her parents how a ventricular assist device, or VAD, could "put her heart on vacation" and beat for her while her heart healed.

Samantha Schaller, heart patient: "Hi, my name is Samantha, I'm eight years old, and I’m a heart patient at Cincinnati Children's."

Heather Schaller, Samantha’s Mom: "Samantha was perfectly healthy, eight-year-old girl and she came in one Saturday morning saying she wasn't feeling well and she had a fever of 102, and so I took her in the doctor thinking it was routine – a flu or bug of some kind – they sent us home saying, you know, it was a virus. And so we went home, but she progressively- she was worse the next day. Her condition continued to get worse and they then told us that she needed to have open-heart surgery. So the diagnosis was myocarditis."

David Morales, MD: "Myocarditis is an infection or inflammation of the heart and when the heart muscle gets inflamed and infected with this virus it's not able to pump. And so the main function of the left ventricle is to collect the blood with oxygen and pump it to the body so the organs and the brain all have enough oxygen. It can be like a storm in that it comes in very quickly and very quickly the heart can become sick. And when it becomes sick then it is unable to do its function."

Heather Schaller: "The doctors came in and said that she was in heart failure and I couldn't' stand, couldn't stand upright. I just bent over because it was such a shock. She's a very healthy, normal eight-year-old, so it's just kind of whacks you when you least expect it. It was the last thing that I expected to hear."

David Morales, MD: "What ventricular assist device does is it takes over that function. It allows that oxygenated blood to be pushed to the entire body so that all the different organs have enough oxygen. And it supports the body, actually, while that storm is there. But eventually the storm will pass through and then the heart will recover and the heart will start doing its own function, and then we can come off the device."

Sean Schaller, Samantha’s Dad: "To be a problem solver and fixer and coming to a hospital and handing that over to somebody else is a different ordeal and I'm not used it but I feel confident about it now."

Heather Schaller: "Do you have any questions for mommy or daddy? You can ask anything."

Samantha Schaller: "How hard was this for you?"

Heather Schaller: "It was hard, but it was worth it."

(Published November 2017)