METAIRIE, La. — It's a health problem that happens to one out of every 100 couples who find out they are expecting a baby.
And a local hospital is standing out nationally when it comes to helping those couples.
Last year on St. Patrick’s Day, a Metairie family got some difficult health news, but with the experience of a specialty surgical team, this St. Patrick’s Day they have a lot to be thankful for.
The Reller family had done it before, three times before in fact, gone in for a routine anatomy scan of their baby who was on the way, but something was different this time with baby number four.
“We're so down to earth and calm and relaxed. We're not going to find out what we're having, and so, but then, they were kind of taking a little while looking at the heart, and I was like, ‘Something's not right,’” remembers Abigail Reller, baby Thomas’ mother.
“It was almost like the silence, or the pause was telling us more about the situation than really any words from anybody. We knew there was something going on,” said Aaron Reller, baby Thomas’ father.
Abigail and Aaron will never forget. It was St. Patrick’s Day 2022, when they learned their baby boy would come into the world with three heart defects. Among them, a big hole in his heart, and the two main arteries were backwards.
When baby Thomas was born on July 21. He went straight into the Ochsner cardiac ICU to await surgery. Three weeks later, a complex six-hour surgery. Baby Thomas' heart is stopped while the heart-lung machine takes over. Surgery is riskier on infants in the first month of life.
“If the operation goes well, you can really render Thomas a normal heart,” said Ochsner’s Dr. Benjamin Peeler, Chief of Pediatric and Adult Congenital Heart Surgery and Co-director of the Congenital Heart Center.
Dr. Peeler says heart defects happen in one of every 100 babies born in the U.S. Some are genetic, but most are for an unknown reason.
“It's an incredibly complex three-dimensional structure, and so almost the fact that it ever forms normally is a miracle,” Dr. Peeler said.
“You're just waiting, and you're trusting, and you know these doctors are amazing, and this is what they do,” Abigail said.
Thomas' surgery was a success. One parent had to be with him whenever he went to the hospital floor. After a total of 40 days in the hospital, he finally gets to go home and meet his big sister and two big brothers.
I asked the doctor this question: “When you get to hand back a baby who was born with this tremendous defect to parents, and say your baby boy is fine, his heart is normal, what does that, how does that make you feel?”
“Yeah, how awesome is that? I mean I get to do that just about every day which is really, it's awesome. I've been doing it for 20 years, and that part of it never gets old,” Dr. Peeler replied.
The Rellers say what helped them through was the support and information they got from other parents going through the same thing, and the NOLA Hawts podcast, and The Henry Aucoin Foundation.
It was also that they were in good hands. The latest five years of data from the National Society of Thoracic Surgeons show that babies who have cardiac surgery at Ochsner, even the most complicated cases, are far more likely to survive. Still, nearly a year after that scan, dad gets choked up as he reads a note he wrote to his son back then.
“She calmly introduced herself to us while we were slowly internalizing the fact that our lives were soon going to change. She looked at the ultrasound and quietly tapped away on the keyboard,” Aaron reads as his voice cracks.
Who knows, maybe dad will read this as his toast at Thomas' rehearsal dinner one day, but for now, there are a lot of little boy things he gets to do first.
“Thomas has got a normal heart, and he's got a great chance to just be a normal dude for the rest of his life” said Dr. Peeler.
When asked if he will be able to do all the things that a young boy will want to do, like play all sorts of sports, he answered: “He better go do all those things.”
Abigail mentioned that other parents going through the same situation helped get them through. Here are the links.
NOLA Hawts podcast:
Henry Aucoin Foundation: helps with funding for children who need heart procedures and medications.
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