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TIM GRANTKerrick Walker's life began with a heart surgery that was the first of many battles he will face to stay alive.
TAMPA - Minutes after he came into the world, Kerrick Walker was on an operating table fighting for his life.
Born with numerous heart defects, the newborn was saved with the world's smallest pacemaker, a device about the size of a quarter.
Kerrick's heart has a dime-sized hole in it and is on the right side of his chest instead of the left. Worse, his heart was beating too slowly.
"He wouldn't have lived long like that," said Dr. Jeffery Jacobs, a pediatric heart surgeon at St. Joseph's Women's Hospital who operated on Kerrick immediately after his March 25 birth.
The tiny pacemaker was programmed to raise the infant's heart rate from 40 beats per minute to a normal newborn rate of 120 beats.
Kerrick is the 10th baby in the Tampa Bay area to receive this particular kind of pacemaker since it was first manufactured two years ago, hospital officials said. Nationwide, about 1,000 babies younger than 2 have received them.
Even by those standards, Kerrick is very small to be getting a pacemaker. Jacobs said this is the first child he has operated on immediately after birth.
A pacemaker is an electronic device that monitors the heart and, when necessary, sends electrical signals to regulate the heartbeat.
"This pacemaker was perfect for him," said Nancy Everidge, a spokeswoman for St. Jude Medical, the device's manufacturer. "A regular pacemaker is twice that size but would have been too big for him."
The device cost about $7,000, which will be covered by insurance. It will have to be removed and replaced with a larger model when Kerrick gets older.
He probably always will need a pacemaker and will need more surgeries to correct his other heart defects. But doctors say the boy has a good chance of survival.
"If the baby recovers from these operations," Dr. Jacobs said, "he'll go to high school, college, get married, have children and live a normal life."
Kerrick is resting comfortably at the hospital after a recent followup surgery to correct other heart problems.
His parents, Derrick and Rica Walker of Lakeland, discovered their child had a heart defect during a routine sonogram at 21 weeks. His heart rate was so slow they feared he might not survive the pregnancy.
Mrs. Walker's physician prescribed her medicine to speed up her heart rate in order to speed up Kerrick's. It worked. Doctors delivered the 8 pound, 7 ounce infant by Caesarean section at 37 weeks.
"When Kerrick came out he cried, and that was my first indication he was alive," Mrs. Walker said. "I cried when I heard him cry."
Mrs. Walker, 38, works as a children's grief counselor at Good Shepherd Hospice in Lakeland. Derrick Walker, 36, is a cook at Lazy Days RV Center in Seffner.
Mrs. Walker has two teenage daughters from a previous marriage. She and Derrick Walker have been married 10 years, and this is their first child together. Mrs. Walker had her tubes untied to give her husband a child.
"This has been quite an adventure," she said.
A team of medical specialists was assembled for the life-saving surgery the moment Kerrick was born. The operation took less than an hour. Mrs. Walker was still on the table from her Caesarean section when doctors told her Kerrick's surgery was a success.
She saw her baby about five hours later, but wasn't allowed to hold him for a week.
Dr. Jacobs said the operation is a medical milestone. When he was in medical school, the first pacemakers he saw were the size of an adult's fist.
"The problem with putting a big pacemaker in a baby's chest is it's like a weight on their chest," the surgeon said, saying it's as though the child is lifting a dumbbell with each breath.
Kerrick's pacemaker was implanted in his belly about an inch below his breastbone.
About four to eight babies out of a thousand are born with heart defects, Dr. Jacobs said.
"It's amazing," Mrs. Walker said. "Ten years ago my son might be dead if he were born in this situation."
The couple had planned to name their son Jordan Derrick Walker. When they learned of his severe medical crisis, they felt he needed a stronger name in light of the struggle he would have to endure to survive.
While browsing a baby name book they found "Kerrick," which is close to Derrick, his father's name.
It means warrior.
- Tim Grant can be reached at 813 269-5311 or at grant@sptimes.com