Salt Lake Tribune
January 22, 2008

Mike Patton Jr. remembers the agony he went through after learning his soon-to-be born daughter had a heart defect.

Brinley Patton’s heart was smaller than an almond when an ultrasound detected a problem just 22 weeks into Rebecca Patton’s pregnancy. “It’s kind of like being tied to the railroad tracks and the train is coming. I had never heard of a baby’s heart defect,” said Patton, of Riverton. “The feeling and emotion of the whole thing was one of loneliness and no support whatsoever.”

Today, Patton and Carolyn Quigley, of Santaquin, are working to ensure other parents of children with congenital heart defects get help through Intermountain Healing Hearts, a support group they have formed. So far, 53 families have connected with the support group, which has a Web site, www.intermountainhealinghearts.org, and a free telephone line, 800-397-1174. It also operates a Yahoo chat group, which gets 300 to 400 e-mail contacts a month.

Primary Children’s Medical Center performs about 20 heart surgeries a month, Patton said. “We’d like to see more research dollars put into finding out what is causing heart defects. Some are genetic, but most are not,” Patton said.

Kaidence Stephenson is one of the success stories that gives hope to parents. So is Brinley Patton, who was born in 2004. She had four heart surgeries in the first 30 months of her life; like many children with heart defects, she also had eye and hip problems that required surgery. Despite those challenges, she is a healthy, growing preschooler today, her father said. “I want to show [other parents] how well she’s doing, that there is hope for them,” Patton said. “Most of [our effort] is trying to get parents with [similar] diagnoses talking to each other.”

brooke@sltrib.com