Kentucky Toddler Home from Hospital After Thanksgiving Heart Transplant: ‘It’s a Miracle’

Rocky McKenna
Norton Healthcare

Two-year-old Rocky McKenna of Bardstown, Kentucky, is now home after a successful heart transplant on Thanksgiving day.

“It definitely adds a whole new layer onto something to truly be thankful for on Thanksgiving,” Rocky’s father, Chris McKenna, told Breitbart News. “It literally gives a whole new meaning to that day.” 

At five months old in late February of 2020, Rocky was diagnosed with left ventricular non-compaction cardiomyopathy (LVNC), according to WBNS.

“Dr. Sarah Wilkens, the Medical Director of the Pediatric Heart Failure and Transplant Program at Norton Healthcare, said this diagnosis is when the heart muscle isn’t formed properly,” WBNS reports. “She said this is when a side of the heart gets too big and it can’t squeeze as well as it should.”

Weeks after the diagnosis, matters became even tougher on Rocky, his mother Taylor Hughes, and Chris as the coronavirus pandemic rampaged through the United States. Rocky spent 123 consecutive days waiting for a heart in the Jennifer Lawrence Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Norton’s Children’s Hospital in Louisville, WBSN reports.

“We couldn’t have any family come up there at all. It was just us,” Taylor told Breitbart News. “I stayed there with him almost every day, and it was really, really hard.”

Eventually, Rocky and his parents were allowed to wait for the heart at home. 

“We had our supportive devices here; he was on a pump at home that ran 24 hours a day,” Taylor shared with Breitbart News. “He had a little backpack that he carried, and that medicine helped pump his heart correctly through a central line in his chest.”

The device supplemented his heart’s pumping ability “because his heart before the transplant was only working nine percent,” Taylor said. 

Finally, in the wee hours of November 24, Taylor and Chris received the call that a heart was available for Rocky. 

“Surgery started at 4:00 p.m. on the 24th, and the heart was beating and completely in on Thanksgiving morning around 3:00 a.m.,” Taylor said. “It was an 11-hour surgery.”

Rocky is already showing signs of improvement.

“He is way more energetic,” Taylor explained. 

“Before, he could only play maybe 2-3 hours a day, and that was really pushing it, and then he would be down the rest of the day,” she continued. “He would just lay around, sit, watch TV, do nothing. But now he’s on the go from the time his feet hit the floor in the morning.”

Taylor indicated that Thanksgiving has taken on a whole meaning. 

“It’s always been a day for families to get together,” she told Breitbart News. “You get to eat as one and be thankful for everything that has gone on in the past year, but now Thanksgiving is going to be celebrating Rocky’s heart, but also celebrating his donor and his donor’s family.”

Chris expressed what Rocky’s surgery means to him while speaking with WBSN.

“It means everything. I mean, he’s been through such a long journey to get to this point,” he said. “And, it’s just a miracle that he was able to get the gift of a second chance at life by getting his new heart.”

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