UMMC patients celebrates 50th anniversary of congenital heart surgery

Three days before her surgery, Harrion was admitted in the children’s hospital, which was built in 1968. The circular layout of the hospital floor made for a racetrack for her and other patients.

“I remember that two other patients and I would sneak out of our beds at night and try to get to wheelchairs to race,” she laughed. “The nurses would scold us and plead with us to go back to bed. And we did.”

After surgery, Harrion remembers waking up in the pediatric intensive care unit. “I was so hungry,” she said, “and I couldn’t have anything except ice chips and juice.”

Her ventricular septal defect, a hole in her heart, had been patched with Gore-Tex, a durable material that’s also used to make rain jackets.

“I still have the wire that was used to close my sternum in my chest,” she said.