Engaging Blog Post for a Cardiac Device Company

As a former pediatric cardiac critical care nurse, I have firsthand knowledge of the gravity involved in equipping certain children with cardiac devices that suit their specific needs. According to the Children's Heart Foundation, a baby is born with a congenital heart defect once every fifteen minutes just in the United States. Of these, nearly a quarter are deemed critical and require one or more surgeries in an attempt to correct their defect. Yet, sometimes a surgery is not the optimal treatment for certain children. In these cases, an assistive device may be needed.

Ventricular assistive devices, or VADs for short, are implanted into weakened hearts to assist the muscle in functioning. Typically, this device is placed into the left ventricle, the chamber which requires the most force and meets the most resistance in pumping blood out to the rest of the body. However, in my time on the Cardiac Care Unit, I saw children who needed VADs implanted into the left and right sides of the heart, often due to a severe cardiomyopathy. There are three main types of cardiomyopathy, and they each come with varying causes, symptoms and treatments:

Hypertrophic: the heart muscle is thickened and may obstruct the flow of blood exiting the heart

Restrictive: the heart muscle cannot relax properly between beats, limiting the volume of blood that can fill up inside the ventricle

Dilated: the heart is enlarged and weakened, greatly affecting its pumping capacity

As mentioned above, if a child's cardiomyopathy is severe enough that symptoms cannot be controlled with medication or reparative surgery, using a VAD as a bridge to heart transplant is often the best route for saving the child's life.

The Berlin Heart EXCOR VAD was commonly used at my facility. Two large cannulas inserted into the ventricle connect to a small pump outside the body which is driven by an air compressor. Any blood entering the ventricle would bypass the muscle itself, allowing the native heart to heal while the artificial heart (the external pump) would maintain hemodynamics and pump blood out to the body at appropriate pressures in order to maintain adequate perfusion to organs and tissues.

In this image, two VADs are used in both the left and right sides of the heart.

At one point on my unit, we had close to ten patients implanted with a Berlin. There would often be traffic jams in our hallways as parents, nurses and physical therapists accompanied underweight toddlers, stumbling over their cannulas and learning how to navigate ambulation with their newfound sidekick. In time, they seemed to coexist with their VAD as if it was second nature, and we all watched in amazement as these children gained weight, "pinked up," and waited until a heart was available for them.

Devices such as the Berlin Heart offer life-sustaining support for children who suffer from cardiomyopathies and other heart diseases that lead to severe heart failure. Though emotionally taxing to witness a young child's sickness and suffering, seeing them open their eyes after a heart transplant, bandages covering the spots where their cannulas lived for months, affords the viewer a newfound appreciation for living in this time of brilliant technological advancements.

Disclaimer: This is a mock-sample for Berlin Heart.