My son, Jibran, was born prematurely last October weighing less than three pounds and with a unique heart.
His left and right ventricles are switched. The muscles designed to push blood only to his lungs are instead responsible for supplying his entire body. The condition is called congenitally corrected transposition of the great arteries (CCTGA) and it affects less than 0.05% of the small subsection of children born with heart disease. Without surgical correction, his heart will prematurely fail.
The team at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital detected his condition before he was born, kept his mother hospitalized, and had a team ready when he arrived. At ten days old, his heart the size of a walnut, they successfully performed his first of several heart surgeries. During his three-month stay, their nutrition team guided him through prematurity without developing necrotizing enterocolitis, a life-threatening condition for which Jibran scored at the highest possible risk…