My daughter’s heart murmurs were heard in the maternity hospital, and when we were discharged we were referred to the Heart Institute. There, after the examination, Diana was diagnosed with a complex heart defect - an open ductus arteriosus and an open oval window. Doctors decided to wait with the operation, within a year both defects can close on their own, it happens, and surgery is not required. We believed and waited. A year-long survey found that the oval window closed and the duct began to shrink. Our joy knew no bounds! But a recent consultation revealed that the strait never closed. You need to have surgery, cardiologists say. It can be performed in a gentle, endovascular way, with the help of an occluder - a special "patch". The operation itself will be free, but you have to pay for the occluder. And we don’t have that opportunity, we live on my husband’s small salary. We ask for your help! Oksana Gamarnik, Kyiv.
Andrei Khokhlov, head of the endovascular surgery department at the Kyiv Heart Institute: “Diana needs to have an endovascular occlusion of the defect with an occluder. This will prevent the development of irreversible changes in lung tissue.