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Three Innovations Shorten Heart Transplant Patient’s Wait Time

It started as a simple persistent wet cough, something Eloise (Ellie) McCloskey’s mom, Aubrey, noticed before spring break of second grade, and it quickly escalated from there. After a week in the hospital and an echocardiogram and tests, the family received the news. Ellie had dilated cardiomyopathy—a disease of the heart muscle—and her heart was slowly failing.

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Rebounding from extraordinary challenges

When Ben Thornton wheeled onto the court for the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program’s youth wheelchair basketball West Coast Conference Championship at Stanford, it was a game he was certain to play with heart — the same heart, in fact, that he received at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford nearly 12 years ago.

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Living a full life on a VAD

The youngest of five kids in the Bingham family, 8-year-old Gage is the third of his siblings to suffer from a life-threatening heart failure condition known as dilated cardiomyopathy.

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Pioneers of the Berlin Heart

For a child awaiting a heart transplant, the Berlin Heart offers a bridge to life. Packard Children’s helped bring this innovative device to pediatric patients in the United States, and achieved some of the early milestones for the most vulnerable patients.

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Three Days, Three Hearts

In an extremely rare three-day series of transplants in May, three young adults received new hearts at the Children’s Heart Center at Packard Children’s, including an extraordinarily uncommon double-organ heart and liver transplant.