TRANSPLANT PROGRAMS
THE LONG WAIT
JUNIPER GELROD’S NEW HEART TOOK NEARLY HER
WHOLE LIFE TO ARRIVE
Meet Juniper
Juniper Gelrod’s new heart has a Facebook page. Like many Facebook pages, it’s the slowly
accumulating record of a childhood: Juniper posed in a Day-Glo orange tiger Halloween
costume, Juniper among the smooth stones of a creek, Juniper frolicking in a sunlit field.
(Actually, Juniper’s mom, Joni Schrantz, is a photographer, so Juniper’s record may be a little
more picturesque than most.) In one photo, posted on National Redhead Day, flame-haired
Juniper lounges bare-belly on a red gingham cloth, two deep divots just above and on either
side of her belly button — the only evidence of the Berlin Heart, the 200-pound machine that
kept her alive for five of her first seven months.
“We thought we had a completely
healthy baby,” Joni recalls. Juniper
was born without complications.
Everything seemed to be fine.
At Juniper’s two-week check-up,
her pediatrician noticed Juniper’s
breathing seemed a little heavy.
“She ordered a chest x-ray and told
me to not really worry about it, that
this happens sometimes with babies
born at elevation, and just to get the
x-ray and everything would be fine.
When I came back an hour later,
she told me she was going to refer
me to a cardiologist at Children’s
Hospital Colorado, and we should
go that afternoon.”
Juniper’s care team of cardiothoracic
surgeon James Jaggers, M.D., and
cardiologist Kathryn Chatfield,
M.D., Ph.D., among many others,
quickly diagnosed her with dilated
cardiomyopathy, a condition in
which an enlarged heart becomes
too weak to pump adequate blood.
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“She was near death,” says Children’s
Colorado’s Scott Auerbach, M.D.,
one of the team of physicians who
cared for Juniper in those crucial
months. The prognosis: Juniper’s
heart was beyond repair. She would
need a heart transplant.
Transplant waits can stretch on for
months, and Juniper wouldn’t live
with her heart the way it was. The
team decided to try a Berlin Heart
Pediatric Ventricular Assist Device,
a machine about 20 times Juniper’s
size that would assist with pumping
her blood. The risk: connecting
Juniper to the machine would
require inserting tubes directly into
her tiny heart.
“It was a tough decision, because
the smaller you are the more
complications there are with the
pump,” says Dr. Auerbach. At just 2
months old, Juniper was one of the
smallest, youngest patients ever to
get the Berlin Heart in the U.S.
For five months, Juniper lived at the
hospital with two tubes protruding
through a thick cake of tape on
her belly, circulating her blood
about once a minute through the
big machine. The transplant finally
came through when she was 7
months old. It was the 400th heart
transplant performed at Children’s
Colorado — a milestone achieved
by only one other pediatric heart
transplant program in the nation.
Just eight days after the surgery,
Juniper and her family went home.
That was almost two years ago.
Now, says Cole Gelrod, Juniper’s
dad, “She’s doing the things a
normal toddler does: she laughs,
she runs, she plays. She is alive and
living a beautiful life.”
At just 2 months old,
Juniper was one of the
smallest, youngest
patients ever to get the
Berlin Heart in the U.S.
Even still, the heart that beats
inside her is a daily reminder of the
child that gave his or her own life
so Juniper might live. “Our family’s
biggest hero,” Joni says, “is a child
we’ve never met.”
Juniper Gelrod's parents and care team faced some tough questions in her first year of life.
Now the most important question is, how big is Juniper? Answer: so big.
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