New Heart

Kelly Perkins climbed the Matterhorn in Switzerland last month. She'd already climbed Mt. Fuji, Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Whitney. Of course, so have a lot of other people. But Perkins may be the first to do it with a transplanted heart. "Kelly's exploits are unique," said Dr. Jon A. Lobashigawa, medical director of the UCLA heart transplant program.

Ten-month-old Madalyn Baynes is recuperating from a heart transplant, but the health crises in the Baynes household are not over yet. The Simi Valley infant's mother remains on a waiting list for a donor heart of her own. That mother and daughter both needed new hearts at the same time is rare enough, said doctors at UCLA Medical Center, but that Madalyn got the heart condition from her mother in utero is rarer still.

In a major advance for heart patients, the government has approved an eagerly awaited type of stent that emits a drug to help keep newly unblocked arteries from reclogging. But it has a big price tag. Cardiologists are expected to quickly begin using the new Johnson & Johnson Cypher stent in many of the 800,000 Americans who undergo artery-clearing angioplasties every year.

A Marine Corps major who chose to join his battalion in the Middle East while his ailing son awaited a heart donor in Loma Linda learned Thursday morning that his infant boy was in stable condition after a heart transplant. Four-month-old Dillon Sellers, son of Maj. Hal Sellers and his wife, Betsy, of Twentynine Palms, was in critical condition Thursday but recovering after a four-hour operation overnight at Loma Linda University Medical Center. Doctors declined to identify the heart donor.

A new heart for the critically ill son of a Marine who was deployed to the Middle East while his infant child awaited a transplant was located Wednesday, and the boy was quickly prepared for surgery. The heart arrived at Loma Linda University Medical Center at 8:45 p.m., a university spokeswoman said. Four-month-old Dillon Sellers was whisked off to surgery minutes later, and his mother, Betsy Sellers, 37, followed him to the operating room. Surgery was expected to last four to six hours.

A California prisoner whose heart transplant a year ago caused a wave of outrage over state-funded inmate health care has died, apparently because his body rejected the organ, corrections officials said Tuesday. The 32-year-old inmate, whose name was not released, died Monday night at Stanford University Medical Center, where he had been listed in critical condition for about two weeks and on life support more recently, officials said.

Fate is finally starting to smile on Anies Garcia. The 9-year-old has been on dialysis since she was 3, and this year her heart started to fail following an unsuccessful kidney transplant. But after UCLA paid for the surgeries and the parents of an 8-year-old boy donated his organs, the Whittier girl left Mattel Children's Hospital on Friday the country's second child younger than 10 to have a kidney-heart transplant.

NEW YORK -- Doormats. Whipping boys. Chumps. Ever since they joined the NBA, the New Jersey Nets have played second fiddle to the New York Knicks, the dominant team in the country's largest media market. They have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous New Yorkers, who ridiculed them as losers. Until now.

The prison inmate who got the heart transplant last month at the prestigious Stanford Medical Center is recovering nicely, but my own heart skipped several beats this week when I found out about the first bill received by the state for the procedure. It came to $913,000. Stephen Green, assistant secretary of the state Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, was almost as surprised as I was. The average cost of a heart transplant in the United States is just over $200,000. Green had predicted that after-care costs could run the inmate's tab as high as $1 million over time, but no one expected this kind of damage so soon.

Inspired by the death of a 6-week-old girl, the nation's transplant network voted Thursday to ease its rules on giving new hearts to infants. The new policy by the United Network of Organ Sharing will let babies younger than 1 year old get hearts that don't match their blood types. The change, which will be implemented as soon as possible, came after a Colorado baby, Arionna Harris, died at 6 weeks old while awaiting a heart. "This is her gift back to society," said Dr.