'Groundbreaking' surgery performed on girl born with heart outside body in Leicester
This article and video report contains an image of Vanellope's heart on the outside of her body
A young girl has had groundbreaking surgery in Leicester after she was born with her heart on the outside of her body.
Vanellope Hope Wilkins, now seven, was born with a condition called Ectopia Cordis - in which the heart is abnormally located either partially or totally outside of the chest.
Described as a 'miracle baby', she was delivered by caesarian section at the city's Glenfield Hospital in November 2017.
She survived childhood and is thought to be the first baby in Britain to survive the ultra-rare condition.
She beat eight-million-to-one odds to survive, spending her first year in intensive care before being able to leave hospital.
Seven years on, Vanellope has undergone a groundbreaking operation at Leicester's Royal Infirmary to protect her fragile heart - by reconstructing a protective cage around it - using her ribs.
It has been years in the making, and it is the first time it has ever been performed in the UK.
Consultant Paediatric Surgeon at Leicester Children's Hospital, Nitin Patwardhan, added: 'Being able to perform a groundbreaking surgery, which has never been done before in the UK, is important for our patients and for the hospital. Our teams do incredible work every single day, and this procedure is another example of this.
'Vanellope is a one-of-a-kind case and I am proud that we have been able to work together to improve her quality of life. We wish her a speedy recovery and all the best for the future.'
During the operation, Vanellope was put onto a heart-lung machine called an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine - a medical device that temporarily takes over the functions of the heart and lungs.
The procedure involved a joint team from the EMCHC and Leicester Children's Hospital totalling around 20 people, including anaesthetists, surgeons, operating department practitioners, perfusionists and theatre nurses.
Vanellope is now at home and recovering - with surgeons hoping the first-of-its-kind surgery will allow her to live a more fulfilled life.
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ITV News
26-05-2025
- ITV News
'Groundbreaking' surgery performed on girl born with heart outside body in Leicester
This article and video report contains an image of Vanellope's heart on the outside of her body A young girl has had groundbreaking surgery in Leicester after she was born with her heart on the outside of her body. Vanellope Hope Wilkins, now seven, was born with a condition called Ectopia Cordis - in which the heart is abnormally located either partially or totally outside of the chest. Described as a 'miracle baby', she was delivered by caesarian section at the city's Glenfield Hospital in November 2017. She survived childhood and is thought to be the first baby in Britain to survive the ultra-rare condition. She beat eight-million-to-one odds to survive, spending her first year in intensive care before being able to leave hospital. Seven years on, Vanellope has undergone a groundbreaking operation at Leicester's Royal Infirmary to protect her fragile heart - by reconstructing a protective cage around it - using her ribs. It has been years in the making, and it is the first time it has ever been performed in the UK. Consultant Paediatric Surgeon at Leicester Children's Hospital, Nitin Patwardhan, added: 'Being able to perform a groundbreaking surgery, which has never been done before in the UK, is important for our patients and for the hospital. Our teams do incredible work every single day, and this procedure is another example of this. 'Vanellope is a one-of-a-kind case and I am proud that we have been able to work together to improve her quality of life. We wish her a speedy recovery and all the best for the future.' During the operation, Vanellope was put onto a heart-lung machine called an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine - a medical device that temporarily takes over the functions of the heart and lungs. The procedure involved a joint team from the EMCHC and Leicester Children's Hospital totalling around 20 people, including anaesthetists, surgeons, operating department practitioners, perfusionists and theatre nurses. Vanellope is now at home and recovering - with surgeons hoping the first-of-its-kind surgery will allow her to live a more fulfilled life.
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First at the unlikely chance and scientific wonder of their deliverance; second at the privilege of their unique knowledge – that never to be forgotten understanding of the once-in-a-lifetime joy of consciousness itself. Morgan not only tries to inhabit some of this carpe diem wisdom, but to find lasting ways to impart it to his reader (the lessons of the book are both medical parables and memento mori of one sort or another). Describing Roberto's remarkable revival through hypothermia, for example, Morgan speculates on the theory that another miraculous return, two millennia ago, may have been the result of a comparable phenomenon: 'hypothermia induced by crucifixion may have simulated Jesus's death. His resurrection [might actually have been] through gradual rewarming in a cave with a consistent temperature. Forget the divine intervention; it was more like divine insulation.' If Morgan is sceptical about acts of gods, he is never complacent about the special magic of lives lived to the full. He takes as his first example of this his wonderful Welsh Aunty Win, whose funeral he attends on his birthday, and whose 97 years he celebrates in a heartfelt eulogy, testament to her '5,044 Saturdays and lazy Sundays, 1,164 bright full moons, six dark solar eclipses, seven houses, five jobs, two proposals. Three billion heartbeats.' It was Win's example that caused him to start keeping notes that make up this book, about people who came, in far more dramatic circumstances, to her innate understanding that life was for living. Inevitably, you learn things along the way here that might act as the handiest set of new year resolutions. The ongoing imperative in every life to find meaning; the solace of being in nature; the responsibility not to waste time in bitterness and to always find space for those you love; the necessity of breaking destructive habits and addictions, and to do all you can to inculcate positive alternatives. YOLO – you only live once – may be the overriding message of these survivors' tales, but that doesn't mean 'splurging your savings, or making bad choices you might regret the next morning… it means finding meaning in the little things that matter. It means being open to new experiences, whether it is swimming in the cold sea or learning to paint, or learning the kazoo,' Morgan writes. 'Go on. Go nuts.' Summer's near suicide prompts several of these revelatory moments. The first of those truisms is that mundane fact that the ultimate irreversible decision is not always the result of long despair, but of fleeting panic: 'Several peer-reviewed research papers have shown that 70% of [suicide] survivors thought about killing themselves for less than half an hour, with a quarter considering it for just five minutes,' Morgan writes. Summer's subsequent reflections reinforce that tragic understanding; she is among those here who experienced seeing life flash before their mind's eye as her heart stopped, and her single insistent thought at that moment was this: 'People are important, not things.' Summer's second life – sustained with the help of eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) and judicious immersion in the video game Tetris – has been an ongoing lesson in mindfulness: 'I'm trying to live for the next few moments, not too many more,' she tells Morgan, before delivering that hard-won truth: 'The opposite of happiness is not failure, but boredom.' Morgan proves an excellent guide to such wisdom. He is grateful to bear witness to these stories – and self-effacing about the part he plays in enabling some of them. In the concluding chapter, he attempts to coalesce all of that thinking, to see if it can be ingrained in less life-threatening ways, by staging a collective 'living funeral' for friends and colleagues – 'eight grown men' – with different experiences of love and loss. 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