Sharon Savino was pregnant with her third child, when right around Christmas of last year she knew something was wrong. The 25-year-old was at the end of her second trimester and developed a cough, felt exhausted all the time and sometimes her heart would race. She thought it was all just from being pregnant until she started coughing up blood one day. She rushed to the emergency room near her home in Farmingville, Long Island. The staff there couldn't figure out where the blood came from and sent her home with medicine for bronchitis. But when it happened again Savino went to her obstetricians at Stony Brook University Hospital and they found an egg-sized tumor on the left side of her heart!
Something had to be done quickly. You will not believe the size of this tumor.
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Although the tumor was not malignant, it was an immediate health threat . It could obstruct her mitral valve and caused sudden death or parts of it could break free, travel to the blood stream and cause organ damage or a stroke.
The choice had to be made, whether to deliver the baby preterm and let Savino heal from her C-section before performing open-heart surgery or to perform open-heart surgery on a woman who was 27 weeks pregnant.
The heart surgery couldn't wait. On January 17, while Savino's baby boy was still in utero she was operated on. What the doctors did in Savino's case is pretty amazing. They were worried that the baby's blood supply could be impaired by the heart-lung bypass machine that is used in the operation. Most patients spend 45 minutes on the machine with their heart stopped for 25 to 35 minutes. "For Sharon, we were able to reduce that to 18 minutes on the machine with her heart arrested for only 12 minutes," says Dr. James Taylor, chief of the division of cardiothoracic surgery at Stony Brook.
Savino stayed in the hospital for a week after her surgery just to make sure everything was alright with her pregnancy, then she headed home to wait for her scheduled C-section in April.
On April 2, baby Maximus was born weighing 7 pounds and 3 ounces. He's healthy and gorgeous. Congratulations to Savino, her partner, 27-year-old Russell Daniels, and their two other children 4-year-old Russell and 2-year-old Shallyssa.
I'm so proud of Savino for knowing something wasn't right and following up until she found out what was really wrong. Well done, mama!
Images via Sharon Savino/Facebook, Daily News
