Modern medicine saved Luciano before he had fully emerged from his mother’s womb. Now, six weeks later, his parents are grateful to the doctors whose expertise and skilled hands saved their child. The medical intervention to save little Luciano’s life began when his mother, 35-year-old Megan Wild, was 24 weeks pregnant.
Doctors told Wild, who was carrying her first child, that the baby had a serious heart defect, hypoplastic left heart syndrome.
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The condition occurs when the left side of the heart does not properly form during pregnancy, notes the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Naturally, this news cast a shadow over Wild’s pregnancy. “When you’re pregnant, it’s supposed to be like a really exciting time, and I felt like all that excitement turned to fear,” Wild told ABC News. Babies with this condition usually undergo several surgeries within the first couple of years of life. But Luciano had an additional complication: There was no communication between the left and right sides of his heart.
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This meant that Luciano might not survive long enough to get the surgeries he needed. As such, his mother agreed to participate in an innovative and new surgery called the EXIT procedure. In this new method, doctors operate on the baby when they are partially delivered. With the infant still attached to the mother’s umbilical cord, acting as its heart and lungs, doctors perform surgery. For Luciano, it was open heart surgery. Surgeons fixed the communication between the left and right chambers. Then, Wild finished delivering him.
Luciano was successfully delivered on January 6, 2025. Dr. Sameh Said, chief of pediatric heart surgery at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, New York, performed the operation. “It was successful, and also should open the pathway for other babies who have similar problems,” Said said of the procedure.
Then, 24 hours after his birth, Luciano underwent another staged heart surgery. Six weeks after he was born, he is doing well as he continues to recover from two operations.
While Wild opted to undergo this EXIT procedure, it wasn’t a decision she made lightly. “I was really scared of what could happen because it’s a lot of what ifs, and you don’t know until the baby is there,” she said. Today, Wild and her fiancé, Luciano Reynaga, are grateful. “I’m very thankful for the doctors and for everybody here [at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital], that they saved him and they helped him come into this world,” Wild said.
