An eight-year-old Texas Boy is finally home and reunited with his beloved cow on his family's ranch after spending 453 days in the hospital following a heart transplant.
Jackson Ward was born without the left side of his heart, causing him to go through and overcome numerous serious medical challenges. Today, he is thriving. He spends the day under the sun on the family's ranch with his beloved cow Itsy and six-year-old sister, Mae.
Five days before Christmas last year, Jackson finally left the Texas Children's Hospital with the staff lined up in the hallway to cheer him on. They know him so well after spending 453 days in the hospital going through many procedures before finally having a lifesaving heart transplant, People reported.
His mother, Leah, thought she would never have her son back in the ranch again after Jackson's chest was split open for the long-awaited heart operation.
But the boy is a survivor.
"It's been amazing to see him enjoy life again. It's truly a blessing," Leah expressed.
A miracle boy
The 38-year-old mother narrated how the sonogram at her 20th week of pregnancy detected that Jackson has hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a potentially fatal congenital birth defect in which the child's left side of the heart does not function.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only about a thousand babies are born in America with this heart syndrome. Jackson became one of them.
But, despite his fatal condition at 20 weeks, his parents knew he would be unique as he was already a lifesaver - saving his mom from depression caused by the tragic death of his only 20-month-old brother, who was killed in a car accident a year earlier.
Leah recalled how she was in a "bad spot," yet Jackson saved her life because she suddenly needed to "snap out of it" and be brave for him, who they wanted to keep.
Jackson's parents have been unyielding in their efforts to save their son ever since.
When Jackson was born, he underwent a three-part heart surgery to increase the blood flow in his body and bypass the absence of the left side of the heart. The procedures were done at the Texas Children's Hospital in Houston when he was five days old, four and a half months old, and the last at five years old.
The procedure was working for a time, giving the boy a normal childhood, except that he could not play contact sports and was "severely immunocompromised." Thus, in his first weeks of face-to-face interaction at school in September 2021, he caught a rhinovirus, which eventually caused myocarditis, an infection in his heart's muscles.
He was back at the Texas Children as his heart severely failed. He now needed a heart transplant, yet they still had to wait for a donor. While waiting, Jackson went through another procedure called the Berlin Heart, in which an artificial pump was implanted so that he could survive until a heart donor arrived.
He stayed in the hospital while the family waited for the heart donor, and it was a tough ride. He developed liver failure and took steroids to fight it, causing his face to become puffy. He also faced depression from staying in the hospital for so long.
A matching donor arrived in July, yet while waiting for it in the operating room, the new heart malfunctioned as it was carried by plane. Everyone was devastated.
Jackson finally received a new heart on October 1 but faced another life-threatening complication 11 days after his chest was split open because of steroid-induced osteoporosis. Doctors also found that he had a blood infection called sepsis, leading to weeks of sedation to cure the infection.
His chest was closed again on November 1. Seven long weeks later, the family finally had their miracle when Jackson slowly walked the hospital hallway to go home to the ranch.
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We're living again
Jackson's recovery remains challenging, his mother admitted, but the fact that he is back home, alive and well, makes it all worth it.
The boy continually takes medications to keep his body from rejecting the new heart and sustain his electrolyte balance. But they have side effects like tremors and edema. Thus, Leah is "always on alert."
He has already had three heart biopsies to monitor rejection and is doing twice-a-week physical therapy at the hospital to regain the strength he lost from the extended hospital stay.
According to his doctors, his prognosis is good, and the goal is to make him live as normal a life as possible, doing everything he wants to do as a kid because they have seen it with their other patients.
In a recent Facebook post, Leah shared that they are "living again," and it is because someone they would want to know soon gave them their boy's life back.
Related Article: 6-Year-Old American Heart Association Ambassador Hopes to Empower Other Children: "I Have a Special Heart"
