Invite out for heart-felt event

WASILLA — A first-time event Saturday aims to increase awareness of congenital heart defects, or CHD. February is Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Month.

Called “Art 4 Heart,” Doodles art studio (in the Crossroads Center Mall in Wasilla) is teaming with Designer Hearts — a local group that supports CHD family needs while in the hospital and in transition — to host the event, which includes heart-themed art, a local blood-drive and Alaska Organ Donor registration.

The cause is personal for Doodles owner Victoria Peterson, whose niece Kennedy, 1, was born with a congenital heart defect called hyperplastic left heart syndrome. She was born with the left side of her heart undeveloped.

Peterson said Alaska doesn’t have medical facilities to provide the type of highly specialized care Kennedy needed, so a C-section was scheduled at a Washington hospital. As soon as Kennedy was born, she was carried to the children’s hospital for her first open heart surgery.

It’s only because of developments in modern medicine that the child lived to celebrate her first birthday, her aunt said. In the past, medicine couldn’t help and babies born with CHD lived only a few hours, she said.

“They would do what they called compassionate care,” Peterson said. “The parents would just hold them until they died.”

Now doctors can operate on babies like Kennedy and repair some defects and heart transplants offer better options for other children.

“Babies like Kennedy, even if they have the surgeries, it’s a miracle if they make it,” Peterson said.

During her first year of life, Kennedy has undergone three open-heart surgeries and several blood transfusions and will require several more in her ongoing care toward a heart transplant, Peterson said.

“This event is dedicated to Kennedy and for all of her fellow ‘Heart Warriors’ and ‘Heart Angels’ struggling with uncertain futures,” she said.

Now doctors say Kennedy will need a heart transplant instead of more surgeries to try to keep her heart functioning.

“It’s been very emotional for our entire family,” Peterson said.

The family is back in Alaska after spending the last year out of state on the transplant list.

Peterson said Art 4 Heart also continues the shop’s tradition of inviting artists from the community into the studio on the second Saturday of every month.

Art and door prize donations are still welcome. The heart art will be auctioned at the end of the event and proceeds will go to support Sisters By Heart and Heart of Grace, nonprofits that help families with children with CHD.

Prizes for participants in blood donations and organ-donor registration will be entered in a drawing to be announced on doodlesartstudio.blogspot.com at a surprise date in February.

Families that have been touched by CHD are invited to participate in free professional photographs.

Contact reporter Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.