Watch the moment 5-year-old Ari Schultz finds out he can leave Boston Children’s after 189 days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtpdGhN-87k

Ari Schultz, the 5-year-old who has spent more than half a year at Boston Children’s Hospital undergoing numerous heart surgeries including an open heart transplant, found out this week that he would return home earlier than he previously expected.

“Two days!” he exclaims in a video his family took Wednesday while surprising him with the news.

Friday marked Ari’s 189th day at Boston Children’s Hospital, 105 days since his heart transplant, and 86 days since his cardiac arrest in March, in which he was put on life support, according to his family. When asked what he would like to do upon returning home, Ari said he wants to visit a baseball field, as well as practice his golf swing and his “hoops.”

Ari’s father, Mike Schultz, confirmed his arrival home in an email.

“We’re out at a baseball field with Ari and the kids now,” Schultz wrote Saturday afternoon.

Ari was “diagnosed at his 18-week ultrasound with critical aortic stenosis and evolving hypoplastic left heart syndrome,” according to the Shultz’s family’s website Echo of Hope.

“This meant if we didn’t intervene before he was born, he would have only a 2 chamber heart,” the website says. “We did, indeed, intervene, first at 20 weeks of gestation, setting us on a wild and unexpected path.”

His family says Ari had two successful heart surgeries before he was born and has had three of his four heart valves replaced, and he’s spent more than 400 total days at Boston Children’s.

Wearing a Xander Bogaerts Red Sox jersey and holding a baseball bat, Ari stepped up to a makeshift plate. On the first pitch he got, the 5-year-old made solid connection and took off around the bases before reaching home plate.

https://gifs.com/gif/ari-s-going-home-66ZZAz