40.0°

ANCHORAGE - An Eagle River boy is expected to return home in a few days after a three-year absence in which he underwent a heart transplant.

Shawn Stockwell, 10, got his heart, but rejection problems kept the boy in California receiving treatment for an extended time. His parents said he will finally be returning home on Tuesday, with a stronger cardiovascular system and about seven inches taller than when he left.

Stockwell received treatment at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto. His new heart came from a 7-year-old boy who was killed in a car accident and was a registered organ donor.

Shawn was born with less than a complete heart, a birth-defect known as hypoplastic left heart syndrome. By the time he was 6, he had undergone six major heart surgeries.

Five years ago, he was also diagnosed with protein losing enteropathy, a protein-depleting disease that starves the body of the fuel required to maintain body weight. His family was told that the mortality rate of PLE victims with severe cardiac problems is high, but a successful heart transplant could eliminate the disease altogether.

In April 2006, while his father, George Stockwell, continued to work in Eagle River, Shawn and his mom and two of his three sisters relocated to Palo Alto, moving into the Ronald McDonald House.

They expected to remain about six months but a year went by, then two, and Shawn was eventually recognized as the longest-waiting organ-donor recipient at the residence.

Last July, the boy received his new heart in what would usher in a few very difficult months.

Two weeks after his surgery, with his heart rate diving, doctors had to perform CPR on Shawn as they rushed his parents out of his room. His mother was frantic.

After Shawn received a drug to combat cardiac arrest, his heartbeat slowly recovered. Later his doctors performed a risky blood-washing therapy called plasmapheresis to suppress his body's rejection of the new organ. That seemed to help.

In mid-September Shawn was released from the hospital and allowed to return to Ronald McDonald House. Two days later, however, he suffered a seizure. An MRI revealed bleeding in his brain.

The experience left Shawn feeling wobbly, with blurry vision and a slight degree of memory loss. Tracing the cause of the problem to a bad reaction to cyclosporin, his anti-rejection medication, his doctors switched him to a new drug.

Again he recovered and in early October Shawn was released from the hospital a second time. Less than a week later, however, he suffered his second episode - this time with a far more violent seizure that left some scarring on the back of his brain.

In the two months since then, Shawn has slowly improved. His doctors found an anti-rejection drug that his body doesn't seem to fight against. On the day before Halloween, Shawn was discharged from Lucile Packard for the third and hopefully final time.