At an age when most babies are active and curious, Oliver Clark lay motionless in his crib, indifferent to his surroundings and gasping from pneumonia that he could not seem to shake. Oliver's prospects for active toddlerhood hardly improved when doctors discovered his problem: a hole in the wall separating the two ventricles, or pumping chambers, of his heart. Oliver was just a year old. Usually such patients do not undergo conventional open-heart surgery until they are at least two, and in the interim normal development may be seriously retarded. In Oliver's case, a team of surgeons at the University of...
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