Heart surgery on babies is ‘part seamstress, part wood craftsman’

There are only about 125 doctors across the country who perform heart surgery on children and babies.

Mike McMullan is one of them. He works at Seattle Children's Hospital and has spent his whole career operating on the hearts of children. 

"Imagine you take a spatula in one hand and a whisk in the other," he said. "You put them in your garbage disposal and stand there for six hours. That's pretty much what we do, but instead of a garbage disposal, we're doing all kinds of crazy stuff in this tiny, little space."

Like a space the size of a golf ball. That's how small a baby's heart is.

McMullan has to get his tools and hands into that tiny space and try to see what he's doing at the same time.

And he has a child's life in his hands.

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"Basically, all we do is cut and sew," McMullan said. "We're part seamstress, part woodcraftsman. We're tinkerers."

Some of his surgeries are more technically challenging, like a surgery where a child is born without a main artery to their lungs. Instead, the baby has many tiny vessels, and McMullan brings them together to make a new, larger artery out of them.

Other procedures, he said, are intellectually difficult. One time, the back of a child's heart burst open after surgery, and McMullan had to figure out how to get around everything else to fix it.

"These surgeries are like legos on steroids," he said. "How are all these pieces going to go together to rebuild a heart?"

There was something about the artistry of the surgery that really appealed to me. There is an artistic aspect to creating things that weren't there before.   

He describes the first time he watched a surgeon perform open-heart surgery on a child as "almost beautiful."

"It was so complicated, and yet he made it look so simple. He was working in areas of the heart I had never seen before."

"There was something about the artistry of the surgery that really appealed to me. There is an artistic aspect to creating things that weren't there before."  

You can find Mike McMullan working at Seattle Children's Hospital around 80 hours each week.

This story was created with production support from Kamna Shastri and edited by Jenny Asarnow.