Baby Kaylee stable, no longer a heart donor candidate

A baby girl at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children whose parents offered her heart to a seriously ill P.E.I. infant has been on and off a respirator throughout Wednesday morning after breathing on her own overnight, her father said. Hospital officials said two-month-old Kaylee Wallace, who was believed to be terminally ill, is in stable condition and no longer an organ donor candidate after she exceeded doctors' expectations and survived being taken off the respirator on Tuesday night. Her father Jason Wallace told CBC News the experience has been an emotional roller-coaster, and he said doctors have still not been able to give a prognosis. Dr. Jim Wright, chief of surgery at Sick Kids, told CBC News on Wednesday that Kaylee will continue to be treated at the hospital's intensive care unit. "Certainly at this point, she is not a candidate for transplant," he said. Kaylee, from Bradford, Ont., suffers from Joubert syndrome, an extremely rare brain abnormality that could cause her to stop breathing during sleep. Wright said the condition comes in a variety of severities. "It was believed that Kaylee had the most severe kind and she would not be able to breathe on her own," he said. Kaylee was expected to die on Tuesday night, and surgical teams were on standby to perform a risky procedure known as death cardiac donation to harvest her heart and transplant it into one-month-old Lily O'Connor. The operation was called off after Kaylee stayed awake during the one-hour window in the operating room. Wallace and Kaylee's mother, Crystal Vitelli, had come to terms with the idea her heart would live on in another baby and had already said goodbye to their child. Lily, the recipient, was born March 9 with truncus arteriosus, a rare form of congenital heart disease that leaves her blood short of oxygen. On Saturday, Lily's parents, Kevin O'Connor and Melanie Bernard, thought they had found the miracle they were looking for when they were approached by Kaylee's parents at the hospital about a possible transplant. 'She's a f