Home Sweet Home

He spent 453 days fighting for his life in the hospital. Now 8-year-old Jackson Ward has a new heart-and is back on his family's farm, embracing everything he missed

- DIANE HERBST, JEFF TRUESDELL

In the field behind his home on the Tarkington Prairie, Texas, ranch that’s been in his family for generations, 8-year-old Jackson Ward extends a hand to pet his miniature cow Itsy, a gift from his great-aunt Peggy. Greeting his beloved animal in December after a long separation, “I was really excited,” he says. “I missed her.” It’s an emotional moment that Jackson’s mom, Leah, feared would never happen. “To see him enjoy life again,” she says, “has been amazing.”

It’s been a long time coming for the Ward family. In September 2021 Jackson caught a virus that caused his heart to fail. He spent the next 453 days in Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston plugged into an electric pump called the Berlin Heart until he received a transplant on Oct. 1. Doctors finally sent him home on Dec. 20, in time to celebrate Christmas with his family. “Though it was turbulent and nerve-racking, we are grateful for everything we endured to get to where we are now,” says Leah, 38. “Every day’s a blessing.”

Leah and husband Jason, also 38, a Conroe, Texas, police officer, knew their little boy’s life was on the line even before he was born, after a sonogram five months into Leah’s pregnancy revealed a potentially fatal birth defect: The left side of his heart wasn’t functioning. The condition, known as hypoplastic left heart syndrome, affects about 1,000 U.S. births per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Doctors said one option awaiting the newborn was to “let nature take its course, and Jackson would pass away,” says Leah. Instead the Wards chose the only way their son had a chance of survival: a course of surgeries on his heart that would have to take place as he grew.