Recently, a medical situation with one of my children had me gnawing my fingernails and laying awake at night waiting for scary-sounding test results. Thankfully, my growing anxiety was relieved after several days by a reassuring phone call from our doctor. Unfortunately, the health concerns of the stars of my most recent magazine story - the Bingham family of eastern Oregon - are not so easily dismissed.
Three of the five Bingham children have a heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy; two of the three (14-year-old Sierra and 10-year-old Lindsey) have already had heart transplants at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford. Their parents, Jason and Stacy, were gracious enough to share their family's story with me for my article in our most recent issue of Stanford Medicine magazine.
Heart transplants are life-saving, but they come with a lifetime of medication and monitoring. Many physicians feel that cardiac medicine is on the cusp of a revolution - one in which the power of stem cells will be harnessed to help hearts heal themselves, or perhaps even to grow new, perfectly matched organs for transplant. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has awarded more than $120 million to pursue potential therapies. No matter how fast any advances occur, however, they can't come soon enough for the Bingham parents, who are now anxiously monitoring 5-year-old Gage's battle with the same disease that led to his sisters' transplants.
At the same time, physicians at the Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease are searching to find the (presumably) genetic cause for the Bingham family's heart problems through gene sequencing while researchers in the laboratory of Stanford cardiologist and director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, work to create induced pluripotent stem cells from the family to better understand the molecular basis of their illnesses.
I've been thinking a lot about Jason and Stacy this past week while I faced my own fears for my daughter. I cannot comprehend how strong they have to be for their children. And, although I work daily with many amazing doctors and researchers, I have to say that Jason and Stacy (and other parents like them) are my true heroes.
Previously: Mysteries of the heart: Stanford Medicine magazine answers cardiovascular questions, At new Stanford center, revealing dangerous secrets of the heart and Packard Children's heart transplant family featured tonight on Dateline
Illustration, which originally appeared in Stanford Medicine, courtesy of Jason Holley
