Vanellope with her mom – credit, supplied by the family

Last Wednesday, a team of English surgeons and attendants arrived in the city of Leicester to be briefed on an upcoming surgery never before attempted or imagined in the history of the country.

Their patient was Vanellope Wilkins, the solitary survivor known to British medicine of ectopia cordis, a condition where a fetus develops with its heart outside its body.

Over a period of 9 hours, the team which included visiting surgeons from London would form a protective cage around Vanellope’s heart by reforming her ribs, and though her team included some of the best pediatric surgeons in the country, the procedure had never been done before, and was invented specifically for Vanellope’s case.

Born in November 2017, the child had to be kept in intensive neonatal care for the first 14 months of her life. Requiring a large about of medical supervision, she is both autistic and nonverbal. Graphic imagery obtained by the BBC shows Vanellope as a neonate partly encased in a bag—her heart exposed in the center of her chest after it got caught and then fused onto her skin during development.

Ectopia cordis occurs in just a few babies per million births and has a low survival rate, and Vanellope required surgery immediately upon entering the world, a process which itself required 50 people to oversee.

Consultant pediatric surgeon Nitin Patwardhan was there when it happened, and was one of the surgeons who recently stitched Vanellope’s heart back behind her chest bone.

“I’d lie if I say I don’t get nervous,” Dr. Patwardhan told the BBC on the morning of the surgery. “But having been in this profession for so many years, you actually look forward to it because at the end of the day, you’re doing something that will change somebody’s life.”

A handful of children in the US have also survived this condition, and now at 7 years of age, Vanellope has been deemed suitable for a permanent solution to her unique medical hazard.

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Placed on a bypass machine, Dr. Patwardhan and his team detached her right ventricular outflow tract and pulmonary artery from where they were attached to the skin, before breaking her ribs and reforming them in a protective cage around the heart’s new location.

A sense of history and anticipation was present in the theater before and during the procedure, BBC reports. The operation was a success, and when the team was allowed to retire from the day’s work, they dubbed Vanellope “one of a kind,” in the truest sense of the word.

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“The best satisfaction we derive from this is when you get a text message from the mom to say ‘thank you, you guys are amazing’,” Ikenna Omeje, another of the surgical team who also operated on Vanellope when she was born, told the BBC.

“I think personally, I have just done my job, but it has made a difference to someone and that is very satisfying.”

Naomi Findlay, Vanellope’s mother, says that in the past, bringing her into the hospital has always been a frightful episode, but now, with her daughter recovering in the pediatric intensive care unit, she’s become quietly confidant, and can’t wait to take her back home to see her brothers and younger sister.

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