CALDWELL, Idaho — What should have been a joyous moment, quickly turned to one of concern, after a Caldwell mom gave birth to her baby and found out he was born with a rare heart condition and had to have open heart surgery in Caldwell.
Baby Micah was born with what’s known as Tetralogy of Fallot.
“There's four different things wrong with his heart,” Yesenia Rangel, Micah’s mom said. “He had like a hole in his heart and his arteries were facing the wrong way and he had to get a pulmonary artery replaced with the cadaver piece, so, he'll need future surgeries to replace that.”
Each year about 1,660 babies in the United States are born with Tetralogy of Fallot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I was like really scared and sad,” Rangel said. “We didn't find out that he had a defect until he was 24 hours old.”
She gave birth at Saint Alphonsus, then moved to St. Luke's where a cardiologist assessed Micah. After that, they flew to California, to the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.
“They put us on a plane,” Rangel said. “Then we arrived there, I had to get my family flown over there too that same night. It was just really scary. I was somewhere new, and I’ve never been there… it was like really stressful.”
They were in California for a month. Micah’s surgery took eight hours.
“I just was scared he wasn't going to make it,” Rangel said. “Like he might not wake up from surgery, even beforehand, like up until surgery, I was just scared ‘like, what if my baby doesn't make it through surgery?’… the days up until I was trying to enjoy it just in case he didn't come back out of surgery.”
Thankfully, he did! Today, Micah is doing well. Other than his visible scars, his mom told KTVB, you wouldn't know he had surgery.
“He's been recovering well, like within a week after surgery, they were taking all the tubes out. he didn't have any more tubes within that first week and I mean, since he's been home, he's been doing really good,” Rangel said.
She told KTVB, she has Medicaid and is hopeful that will cover the surgery and expenses, but she's not sure. The family started a GoFundMe in the meantime to pay for their living and travel expenses, since Micah's dad wasn't able to work while they were in California. You can find that GoFundMe page here. Rangel adds, she's grateful to St. Luke’s for sending them to California and to the Ronald McDonald house because that's where they stayed.
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