Waiting for a heart: Family shares story to encourage organ donations

By Meghan Moriarty

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    PALM BAY, Florida (WESH) — A Palm Bay family is raising awareness about organ donations after learning their 4-year-old son will need his second heart transplant.

“If you watch him, and you look at pictures of him and see videos of him — he looks like a normal kid,” Crystal Golinello said. “He’s outside riding his scooter and playing with toys, playing with superheroes and things like that. He looks relatively normal, but on the inside, his heart is at risk of having a heart attack, essentially.”

Crystal and Salvatore Golinello’s son, Matteo, was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. He underwent open-heart surgery at just a week old and received a new heart when he was 8 months old.

Flash forward to July 2023, and Matteo was diagnosed with coronary artery disease. He’s back in the hospital at the Ronald McDonald House, patiently waiting for another donor heart.

“I think we kind of anticipated when we got here somewhere between a four and six-month wait time. Yesterday marked five months here,” Crystal said. “So, we’re kind of right in the middle of that window, and he hasn’t had any offers.”

Crystal has stayed at the hospital with Matteo in Gainesville for the last five months, while her husband and their older son, Leo, live in Palm Bay, visiting on the weekends. Crystal is a teacher at Southwest Middle School but has been on family leave to care for her son.

“We’re just trying to balance this game of him having some type of life as best as we can here, without endangering his health,” Salvatore Golinello said.

While they wait, they’re hoping their story can educate and encourage people to think about becoming organ donors.

“There are always, especially in the pediatric world, more people waiting for transplants than transplants available,” Crystal said. “A lot of it is just people not being educated, just not understanding or knowing.”

You can easily sign up online or when you get your driver’s license renewed.

She said it could help save or improve someone else’s life.

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