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Vinnie Holliday was born on November 7 with only half of his heart formed in his chest. His mother, Claire, had already known her son would be born with this condition about 20 weeks ago.
But when she’d been given the choice to end the pregnancy, she decided against it.
During Claire’s 20-week pregnancy scan, doctors told her that her son, Vinnie, had hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), a condition that results in an abnormal blood flow through the heart. The effects of this condition will endure throughout the patient’s lifetime.
Despite knowing all of this, Claire came to the “instant decision” of keeping Vinnie. “I’d carried him for 20 weeks and I was already showing. I thought, if I just have the chance to hold him I can carry on better than if I have a termination.”
When Vinnie was born, he weighed 7 pounds and 2 ounces – and doctors struggled to get him to breathe properly, but they respected Claire’s wishes with her son and even allowed her to hold him.
In the middle of that first night though, Vinnie stopped breathing. “I was hysterical,” Claire admitted, “We knew it was going to happen, but it was still a massive shock.”
Vinnie was immediately put on a ventilator and doctors made plans to perform open heart surgery on him, in hopes of getting him to better support his own body and life.
So when Vinnie was only two days old, he underwent open heart surgery and had a “handmade heart” fit in place of his half heart. Doctors had to “rewire” Vinnie’s heart in order to get the blood flow moving as it should be.
For the next three weeks, Vinnie was kept in the hospital to be monitored.
Now, miraculously, Vinnie has been cleared to go home. His parents are completely unprepared for their son, as they had spent so much of their pregnancy mourning and simply hoping that their son would survive – they never actually got around to preparing for his return home.
But in spite of it all, Claire said, “It’s been absolutely amazing. We’ve loved every second and you would never know there was anything wrong with him unless you saw the scar down his chest.
“I take pictures every day and am focusing on building memories - we don’t think about tomorrow. I’m getting no sleep but I just don’t care because I never thought we’d have him.”
