SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — We have an exciting update to a story we brought you earlier this year about a young Brookings boy who was born with a heart defect and later needed a transplant. 

8-year-old Camden Madsen received the call last week and had the heart transplant surgery on Thursday.

Camden’s mom Stacee Madsen says the 13-hour-long surgery went well.

“During the night after surgery, his blood pressure really dropped, and they had to reopen his chest to kind of help alleviate that. And then a couple hours later, they had to put him on ECMO, which is like a heart and lung bypass machine that just does the work while the body can kind of rest,” Stacee said. 

As of Sunday, Camden was still on the ECMO machine, but they say that’s pretty common in this case. 

After years of hospital visits and nearly 30 total surgeries and other procedures, they say this big step is like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

“We kind of dreaded that he would have to get a transplant in the early stages of all the surgeries, and that was always kind of on the back burner. And now that it’s actually here, hopefully, you can get healed up and get home. So it’s good to have an end goal in sight,” Camden’s dad Mike Madsen said.

Camden was on a transplant list at a Chicago hospital and has been waiting there since mid-February. What could have been a wait of up to a year or more was only about two and a half months. 

“It’s good to see that he’s still in there. You know, even though he’s on all these medications and you know, sedated, that he’s still in there just fighting to go home,” Stacee said.

They expect Camden to be up and moving around in the next couple of weeks, but they’ll have to stay in Chicago for a while depending on how his recovery goes. 

“We have to stay just to be in the area, and then after that six months we can go home as long as everything’s going well, we can look at that way,” Mike said.  

Stacee says this heart should last about 10 years until he’ll need to be listed on a transplant list again.

If you would like to help, you can find the GoFundMe here.