Infant Born With Rare Birth Defect Returns Home After Heart Transplant

Lincoln Seay spent 465 days away from home due to a medical condition.

ByABC News
October 4, 2016, 11:52 AM
Lincoln Seay's parents said he was looking "death in the face" before his heart transplant.
Lincoln Seay's parents said he was looking "death in the face" before his heart transplant.
Ron and Mindy Seay

— -- One family has never been so happy to bring their baby home from the hospital.

Lincoln Seay of Anchorage, Alaska, has spent much of his young life in a hospital after being born with heterotaxy syndrome, a rare birth defect that abnormally arranges internal organs. Born last summer at Seattle Children's Hospital, Lincoln underwent multiple surgeries for the condition but ultimately needed a heart transplant when he was just 7 months old. Lincoln had gone into cardiac arrest multiple times before the operation, including as he was being prepped for the transplant.

"He’s been pretty sick and getting sicker," Dr. Michael McMullen, surgical director of heart transplantation at Seattle Children’s Hospital, told ABC News in an earlier interview. "I think he was about to die on us. Right before he fell off the edge, a heart became available."

The team was able to get him on a heart bypass machine, saving his life just before the transplant.

"It was a whole roller coaster thing," Lincoln's mother, Mindy Seay, told ABC News in an earlier interview. "I was shocked, I was elated, I was sad for the other family. I had every emotion you could think of."

Now 14 months old, Lincoln has finally recovered enough to return to Anchorage with his parents. In September, Mindy Seay said Lincoln's doctors had finally given him the all clear to go to Anchorage as long as the family returned every month to be monitored by doctors.

"I cannot tell you how many emotions collided in my chest all at once when it finally struck me," Seay wrote on Facebook on Sept. 14. "We are finally going home. HOME. Home to our kids, our family, our community, our house that we’ve never actually got to live in."

Mindy and Rob Seay have been updating family and friends over the last two weeks with posts on Lincoln.

"I think its safe to say somebody likes church!" Seay wrote on Facebook.