Help Isaac and his family.

 

 

This is Isaac's story and we hope you will take some time to help if you are able to;

 

The beginning: Isaac had been having trouble for weeks with intense crying episodes, profuse sweating and a lot of difficulty breastfeeding. He was putting on weight though and checks a lot of other positive boxes but something wasn't sitting right with them for weeks despite taking him to see medical professionals on the island of St Croix. They (Mollie=Mom, Chris=Dad) took him to see a new pediatric PA that they heard about on island, Jeff Donnelly, after they were disappointed with the pediatrician we had been taking him to.

Long story short, Jeff told them that they needed to fly him up to Miami immediately and take him to the ER at the Nicklaus children's hospital. It's the same hospital Noah (Isaac's older brother) had his surgery at.

Turns out, Jeff Donnelly is a good man, and all the staff here told me to thank him profusely.

Little Isaac had been having heart failure all along. Born with a heart malformation. Nothing that could have been prevented and only detected if Mollie had been a high risk pregnancy for having heart issues herself or other factors that would have made her a high risk pregnancy.

 

Either way, very long day for them when they first arrived in Miami. Mollie started by climbing into the bed there at the hospital in the room that her and Isaac were sharing in the pediatric cardiac ICU.

 

He went in for heart surgery the next morning. It was coarctation of his aorta - As a result, the left side of his heart is barely functioning.

His symptoms, the intense crying episodes, the profuse sweating, and the difficulty eating were telltale signs for it apparently.

 

His surgery was a thoracotomy. He has a large incision running from his upper back on the left side that goes down and traces his shoulder blade and down around to the side of his rib cage. So they kinda opened him up like a scallop, moved his lung out of the way, pulled out his aorta and got to work. It's really unbelievable. The Dr. made a little binder with all the step-by-step pics from the surgery as well as the final pics of the piece of malformed aorta he removed. He uses his fingertip for scale in all the photos. It's so cool.

 

 

 

Currently: Isaac is getting a bit stronger everyday. He's off of his oxygen as of yesterday morn and is down to just 2 med lines now. Once he's off all the meds we can start to pick him up and I'll be able to breastfeed him again.

 

 

 

He's getting more vocal now and is just eating up a storm and smiling and cooing which is great!

His right leg was cold and not getting good circulation so they ultrasounded it again and found a couple clots which are unfortunately collateral damage from the surgery. They are starting him on two anticoagulant subcutaneous injections 2x a day for the next 4-6 weeks which they are showing us how to administer tonight because we will obviously be bringing them home with us to give him until he can follow up with a cardiologist at the 6 wk mark to run another ultrasound to make sure the clots are under control

 

How you're helping: Between the expenses of the surgery, Isaac's medication, monitoring, check-ins, and the fact that they now need to stay in Miami for the foreseeable future (putting their jobs on hold in St Croix, where they've lived for ~10 years), any financial support would be immensely appreciated.

 

Keep The little guy in your thoughts.