A 13-month-old boy left hospital yesterday without needing a heart transplant after being kept alive on an artificial heart machine for an unprecedented four months.

Jack Vellam, from Pitsford, Northamptonshire, suffered from myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and would have died but for the machine, known as a Berlin Heart, and the skills of his medical team.

Patients are normally kept on the device for just 30 days for assessment because the longer a child is on it the more difficult it becomes to remove.

Jack fell ill in March. His condition worsened and the family rushed him to their local hospital in Northampton, where he had a heart attack.

He was transferred to the intensive care unit in Leicester. As his life ebbed, doctors recommended that the family consider switching off his life support machine. Jack’s mother, Danielle Hastings, 18, and father, Terry, 21, an apprentice plumber, agreed. But then the doctors suggested that they put him on a Berlin Heart and try for a heart transplant.

Miss Hastings said: “It was a heartbreaking ordeal for all of us. I said I didn’t want him to suffer any more than he already had. When they suggested a heart transplant, I began to think, ‘I have to let my little boy have a chance’.”

He was transferred to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle and placed on a life support machine called an ECMO which supplied him with oxygen-rich blood and a Berlin Heart. The pump, which acts like an artificial heart, remained outside the body and was attached to his own heart by four tubes, each held in place with 60 stitches.

As one in three children recover from myocarditis on their own, the medics decided to wait and see if Jack’s own heart could grow strong enough to work on its own without the need for a transplant.

The device was removed 15 days ago in a tricky and dangerous operation. Jack’s treatment will now be continued at the hospital in Northampton.

Dr Richard Kirk, the consultant paediatric cardiologist, said: “You can realistically live on the ECMO life support machine he was using for four weeks - that would not have been enough time for a transplant or for him to recover from the myocarditis.

“What is unique about Jack is that he is the youngest patient ever to have this myocarditis and be kept alive on a Berlin Heart for so long.”

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