Charlotte Madeleine McGarrity Charlotte's Heart Surgery

Hi and thank you for visiting Charlotte's CaringBridge website!

Sweet Charlotte Madeleine was born in Chicago on October 9, 2018 and her birth parents asked us (Sonia and Jeff McGarrity) if we would welcome her to our family.  Our other children (Thomas, Sean, Jeffrey, Brendan, Cecilia, Augustine and RoseMarie) were overjoyed when she arrived  in Colorado on Friday, November 9.

Charlotte had an atrio-ventricular septal defect (AVSD), a condition in which the heart does not form properly, which often happens to differing degrees in children with Down Syndrome.  After several (scary) days in the Cardiac ICU here in Denver when she first arrived, she was able to come home to grow and await open heart surgery to correct the AVSD.  

Charlotte had her first open heart surgery performed by Dr. Max Mitchell at Children's Hospital in Denver on Thursday, February 21st, 2019. While this surgery is performed several dozen times each year at Children's, since Charlotte was only four months old, there was obviously some risk involved but she came through with flying colors and was home in a week!

She has grown well over the past year however after two echocardiograms that looked fine, an echo on Dec. 6, 2019 showed that her heart pressures were elevated and another on December 17 confirmed that one of the “valves” that Dr. Mitchell created in her heart had come apart which was allowing blood to go in the wrong direction.

She has a second open heart surgery scheduled on Friday, January 31st. Dr. Mitchell is her surgeon again and he has shared that because of the fact that her heart formed so a-typically, it is going to be more difficult to repair this time and she may eventually need another surgery to insert an artificial valve.

We are grateful for your journeying with us as God’s plan for Charlotte unfolds in the lives of our family, our friends and our faith community!