Saving Henry Read Free

of his allergies, and the phone kept ringing. As much as I accepted people’s good wishes and congratulations, I was increasingly filled with dread. I still hadn’t met my son. I couldn’t tell anyone what was wrong. I couldn’t even answer the question of who he looked like. Finally, a doctor I hadn’t met before walked into the room. He introduced himself, and upon hearing his title—Dr. Thomas Hougen, head of cardiology at nearby Children’s National Medical Center—and registering the look on his face, Allen asked everyone to wait in the hallway. After closing the door, the doctor explained that Henry had a serious, but correctable, heart defect called tetralogy of Fallot.
    Those three words meant nothing to me. As the doctor spoke, repeatedly mentioning Henry’s heart, all I could think was that this man had to be in the wrong room, talking to the wrong mom, about the wrong baby. “This doesn’t make any sense,” I thought to myself. “It’s just an extra thumb.” It was as if I were an observer of my own life, like an actor in a bad made-for-TV movie. But Dr.Hougen kept saying the name Henry, and he kept talking as if he were saying something we needed to know. I looked over at Allen, at the concern creasing and folding the features of his face. I reached down and touched my deflated belly, swollen and pulsating with life just hours earlier. I fingered the thick bandages covering the sutures that held my abdomen together. With that, all the benefits of denial vanished.
    Dr. Hougen, a softspoken and kind man, gently and carefully explained that our son, barely six hours old, had four different heart problems. The first was ventricular septal defect, which was a hole between the two bottom chambers, or ventricles, of the heart. The second was pulmonary stenosis, or an obstruction at or below the pulmonary valve. Also, the aorta (the major artery from the heart to the body) lay directly over the ventricular septal defect, and the right ventricle was more muscular than normal. I tried to listen carefully as he explained everything, but as someone whose last hospitalization had been on the day she was born, I just could not make sense of what he was talking about. It was like he was an adult in a Peanuts cartoon, emitting “blah blah blah,” speaking in a language I didn’t understand. When Dr. Hougen showed us pictures of a normal heart and a heart with tetralogy, I couldn’t even tell the difference.
    In short, Henry was what is known as a “blue baby.” Because tetralogy of Fallot causes lower than normal levels of oxygen in the blood, it causes babies to turn blue. There was a good chance that Henry could have a “blue” episode in the next couple of days, weeks, or months. If he did, he would need emergency surgery to insert a shunt into his heart, which would provide adequate blood flow to his lungs as a temporary fix. And even if he didn’t have an episode, when he reached twelve pounds, he would still need to have the defects fixed through open-heart surgery. I listened, but I don’t think I heard anything beyond “Henry” and “open-heart surgery.”My body started shaking uncontrollably. I was desperate to hold this Henry he was talking about; scared that I would never have the opportunity.
    â€œPlease,” he said with a look of genuine tenderness, “try not to worry. Henry is going to be OK. This is correctable. It has a ninety-nine-percent success rate. And I know the perfect surgeon.”
    I wanted to trust him, to find some comfort in that number— 99 percent —but I was too busy fighting the terror escalating in me. As a first-time mother at thirty years old, I felt ill-equipped to care for a healthy baby, let alone one with a serious heart problem and an extra thumb. I didn’t even know how to change a diaper. With the help of friends, we had chosen a pediatrician, but we