Baby Snatched from Death:
Surgeries Fix Heart After Defect was Detected in Womb
Within minutes of Kahlil Essebar's birth at Children's Hospital in January, doctors created a hole between the chambers of his tiny heart that nature had forgotten to make.
Almost five months and several heart surgeries later, the boy finally was able to go with his parents to their Denver home Thursday. His Jan. 4 birth also made a bit of history. Kahlil is the first baby born at Children's in the hospital's 99-year history.
"I'm just happy to go home with my son - it's a big day for me," his mother, Amal Darif, said as her baby dozed fitfully beneath a Winnie the Pooh blanket, a bit of baby formula dripping from an intravenous tube onto her pant leg.
Kahlil is the first child born to Darif and her husband, Hassan Essebar, an information technology specialist from Casablanca, Morocco. They married three years ago.
Their son owes his survival to a relatively new area of medicine in which doctors use ultrasound technology to diagnose potentially fatal congenital problems while the child is still in the womb.
Fetal echo technology
Specifically, he benefited from advances in fetal echo technology, which started 20 years ago with images of shadow and light and has advanced to the point where doctors can see the fetal heart in considerable detail.
"Professionally, it's very gratifying," said Dr. Robert McDuffie, a perinatologist with Kaiser Permanente who diagnosed the problem 27 weeks before Kahlil's mom was due to give birth. "But it's always bittersweet, because when you find something like this, you know what it means to the parents."
McDuffie recognized that Kahlil had hypoplastic left heart syndrome - essentially, the left part of his heart was deformed. Even worse, he was missing the hole that allows blood to flow between the right and left chambers of the heart, a condition that affects about one in 10 infants born with the fatal syndrome.
In the womb, where the placenta provides a flow of blood and oxygen to the fetus, the defect is not a problem.
But at birth, once the umbilical cord is severed, blood that collects in the right chamber of the heart is unable to pass to the left chamber.
'Almost universally dead'
"In this case, traditionally 10 percent of the kids that are born are almost universally dead by the time they are born, and they are sick from the moment they take their first breath," said Dr. Adel Younoszai, a fetal cardiologist who started at Children's in September.
That realization led to two months of intense planning between doctors at Children's and St. Joseph Hospital, where Kahlil's mom had been scheduled to give birth. They decided the child could not be delivered at St. Joseph because he would not survive the transfer to Children's.
So immediately after Kahlil was born, he was moved to the operating room at Children's, where doctors were able to quickly place him on a life-support machine that mimicked the role of the mother's placenta.
Today, Kahlil is an 11-pounder who will still require ongoing care but no longer needs 24-hour hospitalization.
"Clearly, he has a very strong will to live," McDuffie said during a news conference. He turned to the parents and added, "We are so happy for you all. This day is a long time in coming."
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