Cooper Whitehurst

My son, Cooper, is my heart hero.

Cooper came into our lives completely blue, motionless, not breathing, and with a faint heart beat. We watched helplessly as a doctor and nurse performed CPR on him the first two minutes of his life until he finally took his first breath.

From the moment he was born, he was a fighter, a trooper, and a heart warrior. We thought that the worst was over, but hours later our world came crashing down. When the nurse came in to take him for his routine newborn testing, she found a noticeable difference in the oxygenation levels between his upper and lower extremities, no femoral pulses, a heart murmur, and that his lower extremities were bluish while the rest of his body was nice and pink.

The transport team from a larger hospital came immediately and took him away for further testing on a possible heart defect.They felt the defect was too severe and needed to call the Children’s Hospital who came and took him away on his second ambulance ride at less than two days old. They confirmed that he had a critical congenital heart defect that needed to be operated on in order to survive along with various other heart defects. His heart was not perfect and our hearts were completely broken. He looked absolutely perfect and it was so hard to accept that something could be so wrong with him.

At six days old, the doctors and surgeons finally felt he was ready to have open-heart surgery. The surgery was successful and even though he had dozens of tubes, wires, and monitors attached to his body, he was perfect in our eyes. Although he will need at least two more open-heart surgeries in his lifetime, he is amazingly strong and inspiring. There has not been a single day, since he was born, that I do not think about all that he went through his first two weeks of life and the special heart that he has. He is my heart hero.