Update on bottom of 2nd surgery and pacemaker installation needed.
My name is Damon. My wife and I, Leanna, are having a beautiful baby boy on August 18th, 2025, who has been diagnosed with a congenital heart defect (CHD).
His diagnosis is Tricuspid atresia, transposition of the great arteries, and a single ventricle septal defect (a severely hypoplastic right ventricle). This will require open-heart surgery in 3 stages.
Stage 1 will be immediately after birth.
Stage 2 will be around 3-4 months of age.
Stage 3 will be around 3-4 years of age.
This condition can never go away, and he may even need a heart transplant further along in his life depending on how surgeries go, but we have incredible faith in Stanford Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital to do an amazing job at helping our baby boy. We are also praying heart transplants in the future will not need to happen.
We were lucky enough to relocate to Palo Alto at the Ronald McDonald Housing; however, it has been hard to be separated from our other two children back home in Tracy. It has taken a huge mental, emotional, and financial toll on our entire family to get through this, learning how to cope and adapt to these next few months, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and financially.
I want to personally say thank you to anyone reading this and that understands just how tough this entire situation has been and will continue to be. I have taken time away from work to be with my wife every step of the way and am not sure of what financial costs may come from all this after it is completed.
It’s hard to put into words the amount of stress my wife and I have watching our kids go through not having their parents home with them and dealing with these adjustments. We have been blessed with great care here, the housing, the planning, the knowledge, and preparation for what’s to come, but I’m not sure what the future may hold or how much longer I’ll be able to do this financially. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
We are now on the 2nd stage of the surgery, called the Glenn procedure, during our procedure they needed to widen a hole in his heart to help his anatomy of how his heart pumps an circulates blood. With that surgery came scenarios that could go wrong, and one of those scenarios happened where his heart rhythm was affected, and his heart now won’t eat on its own without a pacemaker installed. After his Glenn surgery going great, he got sick, which extended our stay, and then his rhythm in his heart never came back to be able to pump on its own. So we are now going through pacemaker surgery, and praying we can get our boy home after 14 days now.
Thank you so much, and have a blessed day.