Heart Center

When Jen Campbell watches 10-year-old Hannah step on the soccer field, she’s filled with immense pride.

“I’m very blessed to have kids who want to play sports because that’s an outlet for them,” she explained. “Not only an outlet physically, but also emotionally and socially.”

The busy mom of four not only shuffles practice, tournaments and school, but also medical appointments at Seattle Children’s North Clinic in Everett, Wash., a regional clinic with pediatric specialists in more than 25 practice areas that provides care for families closer to home.

When Campbell’s daughter Hannah was born, she was diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardia, a problem stemming from the heart’s electrical activity which causes an irregular heart rhythm, and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a thickening of the heart muscle.

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In July 2021, Kaelyn, a seemingly healthy, happy 10-month-old, woke up one morning with a puffy face. Her parents, Christine and Jerome, assumed she was having an allergic reaction. They took her to the nearest hospital in their hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii, where she underwent various tests to determine the cause.

In the hospital, Kaelyn’s condition deteriorated, and she was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where Christine and Jerome learned their daughter’s heart function was severely diminished and she had little chance of survival without major intervention.

Kaelyn was born with left ventricular non-compaction cardiomyopathy – a condition in which the lower left heart chamber doesn’t develop properly – that went undetected throughout pregnancy and her first 10 months of life.

Kaelyn was placed on life support for five days before she was transferred to Seattle Children’s. Christine and Jerome left their jobs in Honolulu behind and flew to Seattle with just one suitcase each, having no idea how long they would stay.

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For American Heart Month, Seattle Children’s providers share their tips for helping kids and teens build strong, healthy hearts.

Protect young athletes with pre-sport heart screenings

Generally, kids are safe to play sports and exercise without concern for cardiac events, but with all types of sports, it is important to do a physical with family history to identify those who might be at risk.

Dr. Jack Christian Salerno, Associate Chief, Division of Cardiology; Director, Electrophysiology and Pacing Services, said parents can help protect their young athletes from sudden cardiac arrest by learning about potential “red flags” before their kids begin competing in sports during the middle- and high-school years.

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Hudson was diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy at 8 years old and received life-changing care to Seattle Children’s

Like many 10-year-olds, Hudson Lewis loves to play video games, listen to music, swim and hang out with friends and family.

But unlike most kids his age, Hudson’s childhood has been filled with challenges no child should have to experience.

Hudson was born with a rare form of muscular dystrophy known to affect heart function but didn’t experience any cardiac affects until he was 9 years old.

Hudson’s mom, KaLinda Lewis, said the symptoms started suddenly — first affecting Hudson’s ability to walk and later causing severe stomach pain, dizzy spells, vomiting and even hallucinations.

“We noticed his body was getting weaker,” she recalled. “He would take a couple steps and his legs would give out on him.”

KaLinda took Hudson to Seattle Children’s Emergency Department where doctors determined that Hudson was in heart failure.

“When they said those two words, heart failure, it just blew us away,” KaLinda said.

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This is the second holiday season Seattle Children’s Building Maintenance Technician Jerome Ramos will spend with his family in the hospital.

His daughter has been in the hospital waiting for a heart transplant since July 2021.  Before coming to Seattle Children’s, 10-month-old Kaelyn, of Honolulu, Hawaii, was experiencing shortness of breath. 

When her face puffed up one day, her parents, Jerome and Christine Ramos, thought Kaelyn was having an allergic reaction and brought her to their local emergency department. Providers ruled out allergies, but recommended Kaelyn have an echocardiogram (ECHO) — a common test used to measure heart function.  

Shortly after leaving Kaelyn with the technician, Christine and Jerome heard a voice over the hospital paging system: “Code Blue, ECHO.”  “We were in shock,” Christine remembers. “She seemed fine when we dropped her off but when we got back to Kaelyn, we saw our child being resuscitated. It was devastating.”  

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On December 30, 2021, Kelsey Schleppy gave birth to her baby girl, Maleila. Within days of taking her home, Kelsey’s intuition told her something wasn’t right. Her family practice doctor assured her Maleila’s shallow breathing and lack of appetite wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but Kelsey kept a watchful eye, nevertheless. Within a few days of bringing Maleila home, Kelsey noticed Maleila deteriorating rapidly one morning and made the decision to call 911.

By the time they arrived at their local hospital in Skagit Valley, Maleila no longer had a pulse. She was rushed into Emergency Department (ED) where the team performed chest compressions to resuscitate her. The team also needed to give her epinephrine, but the standard method of inserting an IV in a vein in her arm or leg wasn’t working.

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Jenna Engelsvold helped gather and personally deliver 23 suitcases full of medical supplies to the border of Ukraine in March.

“Helping other people is a really important part of my life.”

When Jenna Engelsvold first arrived at Seattle Children’s as a nursing student more than a decade ago, she knew this is where she wanted to be.

“I was walking down the hall and looking around and just felt this gut feeling that this was where I wanted to start my career. To this day, I have never regretted that decision,” she explained.

As Engelsvold’s passion for pediatrics grew while at Seattle Children’s, so did her career, starting as a nurse in 2011 and then joining the nurse practitioner team in 2018 after completing graduate school. In her current role, she cares for patients who have undergone cardiac surgery and helps enable parents to take care of their child once they leave the hospital.

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In 2016, Seattle Children’s extended their mobile extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) capabilities to provide the service to critically ill children during transport to the hospital from anywhere in a five-state region. ECMO is an advanced life-support therapy that functions for the heart and lungs when the organs fail or need to rest. Seattle Children’s became the first children’s hospital on the West Coast to offer mobile ECMO service, providing critically ill patients with life-saving cardiac, respiratory or transplant care while they are being transported to the hospital.

“The main reason we developed mobile ECMO is because it enables us to take care of kids over a very broad region and offer the same type of high-level medical care to the kids who are not fortunate to live near a hospital like Seattle Children’s,” said Dr. Michael McMullan, chief of Cardiac Surgery and director of mechanical cardiac support and extracorporeal life support services at Seattle Children’s, as well as an professor of surgery at the UW School of Medicine. “When we looked at data in Washington state, we found that kids who do not live near a hospital like ours are at a three-fold increased risk of dying of illness due to a lack of access to care.” Read full post »

A 3D printed heart

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the old saying goes. But how much is a 3D-printed model of what’s in that picture worth?

For pediatric surgeons who use 3D-printed hearts of the children they operate on, their impact can be huge. And for surgeons-in-training, this technology can allow them to learn new and rare procedures on a realistic-looking organ.

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The Renata Minima Stent can be gradually expanded up to adult size over the course of the child’s lifetime

As Director of Cardiac Catherization Labs at Seattle Children’s, Dr. Brian Morray routinely performs diagnostic as well as complex heart procedures on patients as young as a few days old all the way up to adults. Part of his job is to provide minimally invasive services for children with congenital heart disease (CHD).

“Congenital heart disease is the most common kind of congenital birth defect,” said Morray. “For the vast majority of our patients, it occurs when the heart is developing in utero. It’s a structural abnormality of the heart that we frequently diagnose before birth.”