Brett’s Open Heart Surgery

Hello I’m Trystian, and I am fundraising for my younger brother Brett’s open heart surgery that needs to be done quite soon.

Brett has aortic stenosis and a bicuspid valve that he was diagnosed with at around 1 year old when a doctor visit for being sick, turned into the doctor hearing a heart murmur. Brett was then referred to a cardiologist where he got his first of MANY EKGs and ultrasounds done on his heart and was then diagnosed. Because Brett’s heart cannot heal itself or just get better on its own and is actually getting worse a lot faster than doctors thought it would, he has to have open heart surgery now. We hoped we’d get to wait until he was an adult to have surgery but because his condition has progressed so much in the last year it has to be done now. Brett’s stenosis is now severe and after doing an MRI on his heart the doctors found a lot of scarring on his heart they didn’t know was here before which is making his heart work a lot harder therefore it gets bigger and makes more scars. My parents and Brett will be traveling to Omaha Children’s Hospital to have the surgery done.

He will be having what’s called the Ross Procedure done. This is where they cut out his (healthy) pulmonary valve to put where his aortic valve is and then put an artificial valve in place of his pulmonary valve. The surgery is anywhere from 5-12 hours long, and he will need to stay in the hospital for a week or so if all goes well. Unfortunately, Brett is also a stroke patient (he had a stroke at birth) and has a cyst on his brain so he isn’t the average patient and doctors aren’t sure how he’ll handle being on bypass and under anesthesia for that long so a neurologist will need to be available as well.

After surgery he will have to lay low for many weeks followed by a lot of cardiac and physical therapy and hopefully he can return to work and school after Christmas time.

So I’m hoping this will just help to offset some costs for my parents and any help is greatly appreciated.

So if you’d like to make donations and help that’d be amazing. I’ve learned in life that everyone needs a helping hand every now and then but in my brother’s case he needs a helping heart.