Aaron Amon doesn’t know more than the basics of the life-saving heart transplant he had when he was 13 days old, but the now 6-year-old Worth Township boy knows he’s lucky to be alive and well.

“We don’t try to keep it from him because it’s his life,” Aaron’s mother Clarissa Amon said of the heart condition with which he was born on May 12, 2002.

Her pregnancy with Aaron and his birth were no different than what she experienced with his brothers Jesse, 12, and Luke, 9.

It’s what was discovered shortly after the delivery that has forever changed the lives of the Amon family, which includes husband and father Richard.

“It was Mother’s Day. It was sweet for a couple hours, then it turned to terror,” Mrs. Amon said, keeping a close watch on her sons as they played on the family farm.

Aaron was born at UPMC Horizon, Greenville, where doctors ran tests after hearing a heart murmur. He was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The Amons had never heard of it.

They soon learned it meant the left side of Aaron’s heart didn’t work properly, failing to deliver blood to certain parts of his body.

Aaron was quickly sent to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where he was hooked up to a ventilator and feeding tube in the neonatal intensive care unit, despite his healthy birth weight of about 8 pounds.

The Amons were given three options for his immediate future: do nothing, allow him to have a series of three surgeries that could repair his heart or wait for a heart transplant.

“If we did nothing, he wouldn’t last very long,” Mrs. Amon said.

They chose the surgeries, the first of which was meant to make the right side of the heart take over for the left. Aaron was 5 days old when the first surgery was performed – and failed.

“You can let him go or you can try for a transplant,” Mrs. Amon recalled the doctors telling the family after the surgery.

At that point, Aaron was losing weight and on full life support.

“They didn’t give us much hope. They told us to go home and make funeral arrangements at first,” she said.

The chances of Aaron getting a new heart before it was too late were very small, but what happened next was nothing short of a miracle, Mrs. Amon said.