Anchorage Daily News

Two weeks after receiving a new heart, 10-year-old Shawn Stockwell of Eagle River remained in intensive care in a California hospital Thursday, struggling to survive.

Following a night during which doctors at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto rushed into his room to perform life-saving CPR, Shawn showed signs of rejecting his new heart, his family reported.

For the past week, his heart rate has grown increasingly irregular, and he's had trouble breathing, possibly due to a build-up of fluid around his lungs, according to reports posted online by his mother, Trista Stockwell.

Early Thursday morning, as his breathing grew more labored, doctors re-inserted an oxygen tube into his throat. At the same time his heart rate fell. Other doctors rushed into the room to perform CPR and administer a drug to combat cardiac arrest. Then his heart began to revive.

"For about 15 to 20 minutes we were sure we'd lost our son," Trista said. "Now he is very, very critical."

Doctors think Shawn's body is waging a battle against antibodies introduced by the transplanted heart, which was extracted from a a 7-year-old boy who died two weeks ago in Los Angeles. They're trying to eliminate the antibodies through a blood-washing technique called plasmapheresis. The five-day procedure is risky because the patient temporarily loses all natural immunities to fight infections.

Shawn was born with "half a heart," a birth defect known as hypoplastic left heart syndrome. He's undergone several heart surgeries. Two and a half years ago, he moved into the Ronald McDonald House at Stanford University to await a heart transplant. He finally received one on July 31.

Shawn's downturn is a sharp reversal from his seven-day post-operative condition a week ago, when he was able to sit up in a chair in his hospital room and tell his dad, George Stockwell, "I feel really good."

On Saturday, however, his breathing grew weaker and doctors placed Shawn on a respirator. On Sunday -- his 10th birthday -- they took him off solid foods to perform a battery of tests. Writing in her blog, Trista Stockwell reminisced on Shawn's birthday.

"Ten years ago, he was medivacked to a hospital in Portland, Ore., where we were told our son would probably never survive," she wrote. "Here we are 10 years later, in a hospital cardio-vascular intensive care unit, watching Shawn as he gets a little stronger every day -- with a new heart."

Now she's hoping that recovery continues.

Find George Bryson online at adn.com/contact/gbryson or call 257-4318.

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