V. Mohan Reddy (Photo: Courtesy, as it appears on http://www.lpch.org)

Stanford pediatric surgeon V. Mohan Reddy, who performed a “miraculous”heart surgery on a 700 gram week-old infant, says the general thought that small babies are “inoperable” is “a myth.”

“A lot of pediatric cardiologists and neonatologists think these kids are inoperable, but I believe that is a myth,” Reddy, who performed anheart surgery on Jerrick De Leon on Feb. 6, said.

Jerrick is probably the smallest-ever baby to survive such a surgery. Reddy is chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and an associate professor of cardiothoracic surgery and of pediatrics at Stanford’s School of Medicine.

“Everyone involved in the operation is extremely cautious and the procedure goes very slowly. What would normally take three hours often takes four to five in a baby this small,” Reddy was quoted as saying in a hospital press announcement. “We have the most experience in the world operating on these extremely low birth-weight babies. This experience, coupled with our ongoing research on fetal surgery, gives us an edge when treating children like Jerrick.”

Reddy, who specializes in correcting heart defects in extremely low-weight babies, explained the complications of performing such surgeries: “Babies this premature are very small and very fragile, with extremely delicate tissue. It’s necessary to scale down your hand and arm movements to achieve a very fine degree of accuracy.”

Jerrick, whose heart is the size of a grape, was given a zero chance of survival till Reddy came on the scene. “Jerrick is doing far better than expected,” said his mother, pediatrician Maria Lourdes, “especially since he was originally given no chance of survival.

“This miraculous surgery has corrected his heart problem. Now I’m just looking at a premature baby. I don’t know how to express how thankful I am.” Although Lourdes is a physician, she was not directly involved in her son’s care. Jerrick was born 13 weeks premature.

Jerrick was airlifted from Southern California where doctors gave him a zero chance of survival. “Barring unrelated complications from his prematurity, Jerrick is now expected to have a normal lifespan,” the hospital said.

“In 2001, Reddy successfully performed a different cardiac repair on a newborn Serena Brown, who weighed only 640 grams at the time of her surgery. At the time she was believed to be the smallest child ever to undergoheart surgery,” the hospital said.

“Reddy performed the operation without stopping Jerrick’s circulation –– allowing blood to continue to bathe his fragile brain during the procedure but substantially increasing the technical difficulty,” according to a hospital statement.

Doctors say the heart normally pumps blood throughout the body in a figure-eight pattern, with the heart in the center: blood circulates first to the lungs and routes back through the heart for an extra push before traveling through the rest of the body, and then returning again to the heart before heading back to the lungs.

“In Jerrick’s case, the two arteries routing blood out of the heart were switched during development, severing the connection between the two loops of the figure eight.

“A naturally occurring connection between these two arteries was the fragile link keeping Jerrick alive, but it normally closes shortly after birth in full-term babies,” the hospital said.

Jerrick’s condition, known as transposition of the great arteries, occurs in about 40 of every 100,000 live births. Surgery is always required to correct the defect, usually within the first two weeks of life.

But Jerrick was too small and premature to undergo the complicated surgery, which involves switching the arteries back to their correct positions. Doctors could not have waited for the baby to grow up since they considered it unlikely he would live long enough to gain the needed weight and strength.