Priscilla Duffy was twenty weeks pregnant when a routine prenatal checkup with her obstetrician led to the discovery of hypoplastic left heart syndrome in her unborn child.  This rare congenital defect occurs when the left side of the heart fails to develop normally.
In a state of shock, Priscilla and her husband, Shane, learned the only chance for the baby’s survival was postnatal surgery, and their Greenville doctors highly recommended the MUSC Children’s Heart Center. The couple made plans for delivery at MUSC, and five days after Gavin was born – he had already been christened “in case he didn’t make it” – he underwent the Norwood procedure. It was the first in a series of three surgeries that would take four years of his young life to complete. Awaiting the outcome of each surgery was traumatic for the family, but the Duffys had done their homework, and knew that MUSC’s success rate for this type of surgery was much higher than the national average. Now the healthy eight-year-old can hold his own on the playground, and his mom and dad feel lucky that they were in the best place possible to treat Gavin’s heart defect. The procedure
In South Carolina, as many as 90% of babies with hypoplastic left heart syndrome are now diagnosed prenatally. Prenatal planning and coordination between referring obstetricians, pediatric cardiologists and our on-site high risk perinatal team result in the delivery of these babies at our surgical center in Charleston. Babies are taken directly from the delivery room to the designated pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (PCICU). Surgical reconstruction of hypoplastic left heart syndrome has become a benchmark of technical quality for cardiac surgical programs. The results of the Norwood procedure at MUSC are among the best in the world. We are committed to clinical research to improve short and long term outcomes for children born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. As one of only 8 North American sites in the NIH sponsored Pediatric Heart Network, MUSC has actively participated in the largest surgical trial ever performed in congenital heart surgery; a randomized controlled trial comparing the Blalock-Taussig shunt to the right ventricle to pulmonary artery shunt in the Norwood procedure. | 
