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Fiona Gray

"She's a soccer fiend!" says Rhoda Gray, mother of 6-year-old Fiona. "And she loves swimming and swinging and being outside. She never walks anywhere, even in the house; she runs."

Her parents didn't want to hold Fiona back from what she enjoys even though she was born with a hole in her heart, a condition known as atrial septal defect. Fiona's doctor, pediatric cardiologist Michael Brook at UCSF Children's Hospital, assured Rhoda and Peter Gray that Fiona's congenital heart defect wouldn't cause her to have a heart attack or suffer an emergency heart problem any time soon. She didn't need any special treatment or medications.

However, Brook also told them that Fiona would eventually need surgery to fix the problem.

"As the doctor explained it to me," says Rhoda Gray, "this defect is like having a hole in your boat and constantly having to bail out the water."

The heart works harder than it should to oxygenate blood that leaks out through the hole, putting more stress on the heart over time. Prior to the advent of open-heart surgery to repair the hole using a patch, people with atrial septal defects seldom lived past 40 because their overworked hearts just wore out.

Open-heart surgery, especially for a child and her parents, is a very scary proposition. The preferred time for such a surgery is after the child is old enough to understand directions but while they are still young enough to forget about the trauma. Like any major surgery, the open-heart patch operation has risks and also involves a fairly long recovery time of six to eight weeks.

"When Fiona was 4, Dr. Brook told us that research was going well on a new procedure called cardiac catheterization, a less invasive alternative to open-heart surgery, and that it might be available in the next five years," recalls Rhoda Gray. So Fiona's parents decided to wait, hoping that the new procedure could be used to repair the hole in her heart.

In September 2002, 6-year-old Fiona underwent the newly approved minimally invasive procedure at the UCSF Pediatric Heart Center. In the pediatric catheterization center, a team led by Dr. Phillip Moore closed the hole in her heart using a thin catheter threaded up from a small incision near her groin to place an umbrella-like device that expanded in place to cover the hole.

The cardiac catheterization went very well, which Rhoda Gray attributes both to the skill of the doctors and to Fiona's bravery. "She was so scared when she went into the hospital, but she did everything they asked," says her mom. "She just astonished me!"

Fiona returned to school just eight days after the procedure and was playing soccer again in just three weeks.

"It's amazing technology," exclaims Rhoda Gray. "What these doctors are doing is awesome."