Watching Kristine Barry and husband Christopher Havill cuddle their two-month-old son Sebastian, it's hard to believe their little guy has been through more major medical procedures in his short life — and even before being born — than many people experience in a lifetime.
Weeks before his birth in May, Toronto doctors discovered through imaging scans that Sebastian had not one, but two congenital heart defects — and they knew they had to do something fairly radical to bring him into the world and give him a chance at a full and healthy life.
That something was an in-utero procedure to poke a hole in the wall between the upper chambers of his tiny heart, which had developed with no opening, followed by an operation after birth to repair his major cardiac arteries, which weren't in the proper locations.
Scans of Sebastian while in his mother's womb showed his aorta, the vessel that takes oxygen-rich blood to the brain and body, and his pulmonary artery, which channels blood to the lungs to be oxygenated, were switched — a condition known as transposition of the great arteries, or TGA.
Doctors also discovered there were no openings in the walls between either the two upper chambers (the atria) of his heart or the bottom two chambers (the ventricles), which would have prevented his blood from circulating properly after birth. While in the womb, fetal blood is oxygenated through the placenta.
"It's pretty intense hearing something like that, that they're going to do it while he's still inside of her," Havill, 27, said Tuesday after he and his wife travelled to Sick Kids from their home in Barrie, Ont., north of Toronto.
"It's something you would think would only happen on a TV medical show, not in real life," agreed Barry, 25. "Doing the in-utero procedure actually sounded like the best possible thing. In my gut, we knew this was what we wanted to happen, what we needed to do."
Now weighing 10 pounds and meeting all his developmental milestones, Sebastian is like any other healthy two-month-old, his parents say.