Into the heart, a medical odyssey

"Little Gregory" Glidden at home

Chapter 4:
A Human Candidate

At first there was a stubborn fever. When it hadn't broken after four days, Frances and Lyman Glidden took their baby to the hospital in Hibbing, Minn. It was April of 1953, and Gregory was just six weeks old.

There's no reason to worry, the Gliddens tried to reassure themselves. Babies catch colds so easily. Just because Donna had a bad heart doesn't mean Greg does, too.

Gregory was diagnosed with bronchitis; his heart had no murmur, and appeared to beat normally. Antibiotics were prescribed, and after six days Gregory was well enough to go home. The Gliddens were relieved.

But two weeks later Gregory spiked another fever and returned to the hospital. Again, antibiotics worked and the doctor pronounced Gregory's heart normal. After 11 days, the boy went home.

By now, the Gliddens were really worried. They knew congenital heart defects could go undetected early in life — just look at their little girl Donna, who had made it 12 years without a clue that she was doomed, and then she died. In quiet moments, Frances Glidden took to putting her ear to her tiny son's chest; after 10 children, she knew what a heart should sound like.

What she heard inside Greg a few weeks later chilled her.

It was the sound of Donna's murmur.

Frances told the doctor about it at Gregory's third hospital admission, that May, for yet another episode of bronchitis. And the doctor, too, heard a murmur — ``loud, blowing, systolic,'' he wrote in Greg's burgeoning record. He ordered a chest x-ray, and it showed an enlarged heart; the radiologist wrote: ``The findings either represent an inter-atrial or inter-ventricular defect.''

An atrial septal defect (ASD) or aventricular septal defect (VSD) — a hole, like the one that had killed Donna.