A brave 7-year-old girl survived a groundbreaking surgery that removed six of her vital organs – and grinned as she left the hospital yesterday at the thought of playing with her puppy again.
“I’m feeling good,” little Heather McNamara told reporters as she clutched her teddy bear inside New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.
“I want to play with my dog Angel, and my sister.”
Heather, of Islip Terrace, LI, had been in the hospital since Feb. 6, when a team of doctors performed the grueling 23-hour surgery her parents had been told was impossible.
“We came here with no hope, and they gave us hope,” her emotional mom, Tina, said.
“It’s a miracle, it’s the best day ever.”
Dressed in pink, Heather smiled at her mom and said, “There’s hope.”
Doctors had to remove Heather’s small and large intestines, her pancreas, spleen, stomach and liver to get to a tennis ball-sized tumor that had grown in her abdomen, wrapping itself around organs and blood vessels.
“She’s a brave girl and she’s doing very well,” said head surgeon Tomoaki Kato.
Through it all, her dad, Joseph, a volunteer firefighter who had spent days and nights at his daughter’s bedside, was primed to donate part of his liver if his little girl’s was too damaged.
Instead, Kato managed to take out the growth and put back the intestines and liver.
His team fashioned a replacement stomach for their young patient out of part of her intestine.
Heather’s pancreas and spleen couldn’t be re-implanted – instantly making her diabetic – but doctors are confident Heather can live a healthy life without them.
“At the end of the case, I really was about to collapse,” said Kato, who slept for six hours on a couch outside the operating room as soon as the surgery was finished.
Heather was the first person her age to ever undergo such an operation – the second ever performed worldwide.
She first became sick in 2005, and the growth had failed to respond to chemotherapy. Doctors had told her parents the tumor was inoperable.
“To whoever is out there that has a child with a medical problem, keep going,” said her mom. “Don’t stop at a second opinion.”