CHARLOTTE — The family of an 8-year-old girl with a rare heart defect is using their journey to support others.
As she skates through the hospital halls, you wouldn’t know Nyla Brown recently had a heart transplant.
“There were sometimes that we struggled as adults, but then we got our encouragement in power from her,” her father, Eric Brown, told Channel 9’s DaShawn Brown.
Nyla Brown underwent three surgeries before she was 5 years old. She was born with a rare heart condition, called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Her family says it’s a lot like having half a heart.
“One side of her heart is pumping blood and trying to do all of the work to keep her alive,” Nyla’s mom, Tia Brown, said.
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By the time she was 5, her doctors cleared Nyla for a heart transplant. Her family received news of a donor on her father’s birthday, and in true Nyla fashion, she was on the go within days of the surgery.
Her family says it’s the support that followed that is at the heart of their mission now. They created the Nyla D. Brown Heart Scholarship, and soon the endowment, to invest critical funding in a field that may not be widely known, but one that helped save Nyla’s life.
“There’s a lot of people behind the scenes that the public doesn’t know about,” Tia Brown said.
The family says the scholarship is for a cardiac perfusionist. Their duties include operating the heart-lung machine during open-heart surgery. It’s essential to keeping the patient alive.
“In our case, this scholarship was a way to process some of that grief,” her mom said. “The more I kept working on the website, telling people our story, the more I picked up donors and supporters, the more it made it a little bit easier to talk about her story.”
Eric Brown says he is amazed by Nyla’s strength during her recovery.
“Today is a blessing,” Tia Brown said. “To see her the way she is now, knowing everything that she went through, it’s a blessing.”
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