Ethan Kolodzinski
When our twins were born, it wasn’t ideal timing. Labor started at 39 weeks, so we knew they probably wouldn’t need NICU, but we were moving into a new house that day. As we drove to the hospital, friends and family descended on our place to move us, so we figured we’d have the babies, and be home by the next night. We thought we’d leisurely deal with the crazy mess of a move over the next couple weeks. We were very, very wrong.
When the boys were born, Lucas was fine, but Ethan didn’t pink up. We were able to hold him for a total of about 10 minutes before he was rushed up to the NICU. He was found to have a hole in one lung, which they were able to resolve, but his condition didn’t improve. After four hours of trying everything they could, the staff suspected a more serious problem than they could treat, even with a Level III NICU. When he was 8 hours old, he arrived at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin under suspicion of a heart defect. He went straight to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, where he was quickly diagnosed with an obstructed supracardiac total anomalous pulmonary venous return. At 3:30 a.m. and only 11 hours old, our brand new baby was wheeled away for emergency open heart surgery. If he had not undergone the surgery when he did, he only would have survived a few more hours.
Ethan’s defect is rare, and not one that is easily diagnosed before birth, so it was like a bomb going off in the middle of our lives. None of our other children had ever had any kind of serious illness or surgery, so we were completely unprepared for something like this. He spent two weeks in the CICU, and another week and a half on another floor. Those were the hardest three and a half weeks of our lives. It was gut-wrenching to sit next to Ethan, unable to hold him, while snuggling his perfectly healthy twin. His siblings desperately wanted him to come home, and it broke our hearts to tell them over and over, “Not yet.” The moment we walked out of that hospital with both our boys is one we will never forget.
Outside of weighing less than his twin, and scars he totes, you’d never know what a rough start Ethan had. The boys are 18 months old now, and we cannot imagine what our, and especially Lucas’s life would be like without him. It is a miracle how we have gone from being hours shy of losing him, to him being able to live a virtually normal life. Half of our dynamic duo wouldn’t be here, if not for the skills of Drs. Jim Tweddell and Mike Mitchell, and the rest of the amazing cardiac team that Children’s has assembled.
We are so incredibly blessed to live when, and where, there was the knowledge and technology available to save our sweet little boy.