A NIGHT OF MIRACLES

Sam after they did catheter surgery.....he was very sick, but alive and we were very thankful.

I think I was in shock....or at least in denial....or something. Right before the transport unit took Sam away from us, I had asked the question.....is he going to die.??? Nobody really wanted to answer me, but as I sat in my wheelchair, crying, not being able to hold or touch Sam, I wanted to know what we were up against. Rod prayed over Sam before they transported him and I had asked, no, begged Rod to go with the ambulance to be with Sam. I made Rod promise me that if Sam was going to die to make sure that you hold him and tell him that I love him so much and that I'm sorry. Believe me this was agony....not being able to be with your baby....it was awful...and then they were gone.

I watched the seconds tick by on the clock in my room....I will never forget that clock. It seemed like hours before I heard anything.

Rod called finally......Sam had Transposition of the great arteries....there was good news with this and bad. I wanted the good news first......it was fixable, but it required open heart surgery.....the bad news......Sam making it through the night didn't look good. Bascially Sam's heart was wired up backwards. The blood was not being oxygenated because his arteries were not going into the right chambers. His blood that went to his organs never was oxygenated, this is why he was blue. The only way to fix this was to perform open-heart surgery. It was a one time operation and he would not require any futher surgeries....as far as they could tell....this was very good news. The bad news....he needed help immediately and he was very unstable. When Sam arrived at Stollery Children's Hospital they quickly went to work on him to find the problem. Once they did they could figure out what to do to try and save him. There were a couple of things that were unique to Sam's situation. When a baby is born and they take that first breath it seems so natural. Inside the womb where it is safe and warm babies don't breathe oxygen....there is a flap (for lack of a better word) that allows the blue and red blood to mix to get oxygentaed and when we are born that flap eventually closes over time. In Sam's case that flap closed almost immediately....this is why Sam was in immediate trouble. In most cases this heart defect goes unnoticed at first and new parents even take their babies home...only to discover a few days later that something is wrong. I am not explaining this with a doctor's degree, this is a very simply explanation, but you get the picture. The immediate danger that Sam was in was that he was so unstable that to try and do anything was a huge risk, but to do nothing meant he would die...what a choice. They called in Dr. Yashu Coe...he would become Sam's cardiologist for the next 16 years or so. On a side not this man has an amazing gift.....his hands and knowledge are a gift from God....what he does is miraculous.......here is a link to just one thing he has done for kids with heart problems. http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=645 Anyway Sam needed an operation to immediately save his life....they needed to buy some time for Sam to get stable before they did open-heart surgery. This is where Dr Coe comes in......he was going to perform a procedure called Balloon Artial Septostomy. What that all means is that basically they were going to go in through his groin area with a catheter up to his heart and rip a hole in his heart so that the blue and red blood can mix. This does not sound good and there were risks involved...what choice do you have though when doing nothing means death. This procedure needed to be done very quickly as they were losing Sam. They had maxed out all of the meds they could give him. There was no time for them to prepare the Catheter Lab so they operated on Sam right on the ward. During this operation we learned that they almost lost Sam twice.....but praise God he made it through. I also learned that when Sam arrived at the hospital a good friend of ours was Sam's nurse.....praise God he was in such loving hands right from the beginning. While this was going on I spent a lot of time phoning people to pray for Sam....word had quickly got out and we had quite a network of people praying....another blessing in all of this. Dr Coe's procedure bought us some time so Sam could get strong and stable.....he still needed to have open-heart surgery, but for now he was alive and I was very thankful. Dr Lemke was Sam's neonatoligist and he was the one that called me after Dr Coe had finished to let us know that Sam had made it through, but was still unstable, but he was oxygenating blood at 80% now...normal is 100%. Rod came back to the hopsital to sit with me and my mom went home to be with our other 3 boys. We had several miracles happen this first night....the most significant of course was that Sam survived Catheter surgery.

What a long night...we spent the night praying for Sam and that morning would come quickly so I could leave. I had told the nurses that I was leaving in the morning no matter what...they just said o.k.

I stared at the clock the entire night....morning finally came......