Earlier this year 13-year-old Matt suffered sudden heart failure after contracting a virus. What followed next was daunting: a near death experience, two hospitals and two surgical teams in two states.

Matt was flown from his home in Hervey Bay in Queensland to the Mater Children’s Hospital in Brisbane. While there he suffered two heart attacks, his heart was in fibrillation preventing blood from being pumped around the body. Doctors tried desperately to resuscitate him. He came to but only briefly. What followed was a near death experience. Matt’s mother Shirley says her son told her he didn’t think anyone was going to be able to find him because it was “all black in there”.

Matt’s only chance of survival was to be hooked up to a heart-lung machine. The machine pumped blood and oxygen into his body while Matt lay unconscious for three weeks. But the machine was not a long term solution.

Doctors from the Royal Children’s Hospital, which takes Australia’s most complex paediatriac heart patients, had been in contact with their Brisbane colleagues. Between them they decided Matt’s case was so serious that he had to be flown to Melbourne immediately.  Read more…