Baby recovering after rare heart surgery

MEMPHIS, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- A baby born with a fatal heart defect should live a normal life after undergoing an extremely rare surgery, doctors in Memphis said.

Cole Latch weighed less than 4 pounds when he was born with the defect Nov. 25 at a county hospital in West Tennessee.

He was airlifted to Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center in Memphis to reconstruct an undersized artery that would have killed him within weeks if not corrected, said Dr. Chris Knott-Craig, Le Bonheur's chief pediatric surgeon.

The baby measured from the tip of Knott-Craig's fingers to the wrist on his hand. Knott-Craig and his team performed the surgery Dec. 1, working with needles and sutures so tiny they "really can't be seen by the naked eye," he told The Memphis Commercial Appeal in a story published Wednesday.

"I would guess with a fair degree of certainty that it's one of the smallest babies in the world that's had this done," Knott-Craig said, calling the surgery very risky.

"It's extremely rare for this to need to be done on a newborn baby, and particularly one as tiny as he is," Knott-Craig said.