GREENFIELD — Doctors once told Mya McHenry’s family it was a miracle she hadn’t died in her sleep as a newborn.
It wasn’t until she was 4 weeks old that her physician discovered she had a congenital heart defect and sent the her to Riley Hospital for Children. Since then, she’s had six surgeries, including two open heart surgeries, to work around the defect in her heart.
For Mya’s family, knowing how much she’s been through made it even sweeter recently, when the grinning 6-year-old climbed into a limousine, which took her to the airport for a week-long trip to the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando as her granted wish from the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Mya has been working with Make-a-Wish Indiana for about a year to plan her trip, said her mother, Morgan Reger. At first, Mya wanted to meet a pop singer, but she found out the singer in question didn’t work with Make-a-Wish. Her next pick was a trip to Disney to meet all her favorite characters.
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Make-a-Wish Indiana grants some 200 wishes a year and receives twice that in requests every year, said wish program manager Kelsey Barta. The national organization fulfills wishes for children ages 2½ to 18 who have had a critical illness, she said.
The organization granted about 15,300 wishes across the country last year, according to the Make-a-Wish Foundation website.
Working with Make-a-Wish has been a great process, Reger said. They have met with representatives several times throughout the year, always at an ice cream parlor so Mya and her siblings have something delicious to dig into while the adults hammer out the details.
“She’s been waiting and waiting for this trip,” said grandmother Therese Hollis.
Mya qualified for the trip because of her congenital heart defect, called double inlet left ventricle, which means she has just one working chamber in her heart to pump blood, instead of the normal two, Hollis said.
Both of Mya’s atriums were pumping blood into her left ventricle, mixing oxygen-rich blood and oxygen-poor blood, which the heart normally keeps separate. From there, the mixture was being pumped into both her body and her lungs, resulting in low oxygen levels.
The condition is rare, occurring in about five of every 100,000 babies.
When Therese Hollis insisted doctors run tests on the baby at her 4-week checkup, they discovered her oxygen levels were dangerously low. She was admitted immediately to Riley Hospital for children, where Reger found out Mya would have to undergo a series of surgeries called the Fontan procedure to reroute her blood flow and compensate for the missing right ventricle.
Over a span of about a year, three surgeries, including two open heart surgeries, were performed to help blood flow into the lungs without being pumped through her one working ventricle.
She’ll be on medications for the rest of her life and may have to adhere to some limitations to her activity level, but it’s hard to tell that to the bubbly youngster.
Mya, a first-grader at J.B. Stephens Elementary School in Greenfield, has come a long way from the 4-week-old baby whose oxygen levels were dangerously low, her mother said.
“She likes to do gymnastics, she plays sports,” Reger said. “You can’t tell she’s any different from any other kid.”
