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Baby Lily Marie Barnard, her mom Alisa Barnard and her whole family will enjoy quite a Thanksgiving this year. A team at Intermountain Medical Center saved the mom and her baby with technology that wasn't even available months ago.
Two-week-old Lily Marie Barnard will hear an amazing tale when she's old enough to comprehend the frightening complications of her birth. Alisa says, "It kind of turns your world upside down."
Lily and Alisa barely survived. The mother's heart was barely working two weeks ago as she arrived at McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden. She says, "You have to find that place where there's faith and hope that everything will be OK."
She was airlifted to Intermountain Medical Center suffering from peripartum cardiomyopathy. Her husband, Paul Barnard, said, "When I first got here, actually the doctors were having a round table and talking, and that made me pretty nervous because normally you don't have four doctors discussing what they're going to do."
A specialized team surveyed her complicated options with about 50 percent odds. Dr. A. G. Kfoury, a cardiologist at Intermountain Medical Center, said, "The decision was obviously how to get the baby alive and safe, and how to keep mom alive and safe." One doctor called it a nail-biter.
They had to decide whether to put a pump in mom's heart to take over some of the work, or deliver the baby first, which could be too much for Alisa's stressed heart.
They put Alisa on medications, monitored her closely in the catheterization lab and decided to deliver the baby first. Paul said, "When Lily had her first breath and had that first cry, I felt jubilant that everything had to come out like it had."
After Alisa delivered the baby in a maternity bed right in the cath lab, doctors transferred her to the lab table and inserted the world's tiniest heart pump."
Dr. James Revenaugh, a cardiologist at Intermountain Medical Center, said, "This was like a medical Rubik's cube. In order to achieve an optimal outcome from one specialist's perspective, you had to consider its outcome on all these other, the mom's well-being, the baby's well-being."
The life-saving pump was just approved for use last summer. It was inserted through a vein in the groin and snaked up into the left ventricle to increase blood and oxygen supply to the heart.
A few days later, they removed it. Alisa said, "The nurses and the staff here were so wonderful. They do more than their jobs."
The baby is healthy. The mom is still tired. After all, she's a mom of four, and there's little rest at home. But she's glad to be home and grateful for the incredible treatment.
E-mail: jboal@ksl.com
E-mail: bbruce@ksl.com
