Something’s Missing!

Healthy hearts have four chambers, or sections. The two upper chambers, called atria, receive blood from veins. The ventricles, or lower sections, pump blood into arteries.

That’s the plan anyway. But Brian Whitlow’s life began differently. “I was born with only one ventricle,” he says. Brian’s heart couldn’t pump blood to his lungs to get oxygen.

But Whitlow’s mother didn’t give up. Nor did his doctors. When Brian was just a few weeks old, surgeons operated on him.

“We can’t rebuild chambers that haven’t grown,” says Dr. Daniel Bernstein, one of Whitlow’s childhood doctors. Instead, the surgeons rearranged his blood vessels to bypass the missing chamber.

After the operation, Whitlow’s blood ran straight to his lungs. There it got oxygen, then it flowed back to his heart. Whitlow’s

Doctors use special tools to operate on this patient’s heart. New tools and medicines have greatly reduced the risks of heart surgery.