Eli Maroquin was born Aug. 17 with a life-threatening heart disease called total anomalous pulmonary venous return.
“We had to reconnect all of the blood coming back from his lungs to his heart because it was coming back to an incorrect chamber,” said Dr. S. Adil Husain, professor and associate program director of Thoracic Surgery Residency and Chief of Division of Congenital Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. “He had an operation within the first few days of this life to reroute all the blood flow coming from his lungs to the correct chamber of his heart.”
After post-op recovery in San Antonio, Eli was sent back to the NICU (neonatal intensive-care unit) at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, only a few miles from his Alamo home.
“Historically, a lot of the children that have very complex diagnoses, while they’re fetuses or after they’re born, get shipped out of the Valley,” Husain said, adding that pediatric cardiac surgery isn’t a service currently provided in the Rio Grande Valley. “That’s a very hard thing for any family – to not only deal with the challenges of their infant having a disease, that’s pretty complex, but having to leave home for care.”
Husain now travels to the Valley once a month to meet with pregnant women and recovering babies in different stages in the process of facing surgically-repaired heart defects he operates on in San Antonio.
Eli was one of the seven appointments Thursday scheduled on the first official day of Doctors Hospital at Renaissance’s collaboration with the University Health System and UT Medicine, specializing in congenital heart defects.
The ceremonial signing between DHR’s chief executive officer, Israel Rocha, Jr., and the University Health System chief executive officer of Pediatric Services, Mark Webb, took place Wednesday morning at the DHR Conference Center in Edinburg.
“Our commitment here is to make sure we bring all the services needed here in the Rio Grande Valley,” Rocha said. “We always want to keep building and keep improving.”
Rocha credited the growing local population, the new medical school and the evolution of services at DHR as factors facilitating the new care.
“We’re now at that point where the people in the Rio Grande Valley are sufficient in size … to bring a whole new host of medical services that previously may not have worked,” Rocha said.
The initiative is the Valley’s first pediatric cardiothoracic surgical partnership.
“Even though the partnership is being formally presented today, it’s really been ongoing for about four months. We’ve already had five families from the Rio Grande Valley (in San Antonio) for specialized heart care, and we’ve sent three of them — soon to be four — for recovery at DHR,” Husain said. “We’re trying to partner with the hospital long-term to see if we could provide some of these services down here so parents and families don’t have to travel, whatsoever.”
Officials said less invasive procedures, like cardiac catheterization, will begin locally. Actual heart surgeries are still years away, officials at the news conference said.
“We’re talking about, in several instances, doing an operation on a child that’s three or four days old. Their heart needs to be put on a bypass machine and stopped for a complex repair. It’s not uncommon that these babies are in the hospital for four to five weeks after their operation,” Husain said. “It requires literally a team of surgeons, intensivists and specialists to take care of that child from start to finish. I think we’re in a process, early on here in the Valley, of having those types of physicians all be a part of the community to be able to provide that service.”
The collaboration continues the hospital’s investment in maternal-fetal medicine.
“You didn’t have 24/7 MFM (maternal-fetal medicine) until four months ago, when I came down with my team. We didn’t have the ability to diagnosis all these babies antenatally,” said Dr. Cherie Johnson, who specializes in caring for high-risk mothers and babies in the womb. “We see many babies, unfortunately, with cardiac conditions or heart abnormalities.”
Johnson said there are approximately 25,000 annual births in the three counties of our region — 15,000 in Hidalgo County alone.
“Unfortunately, there is an increased risk of babies with cardiac abnormalities in our region,” Johnson said. “To have a team, such as our pediatric cardiologists and Dr. Husain, a pediatric cardiovascular surgeon, join us only enhances the care of these special-care babies.”
Johnson said she’s just seen an expectant, high-risk mother who originally was referred because of high blood pressure.
“We found a very complex heart condition. It takes this level of expertise from our ultrasound specialist, and my office, to find those problems and make sure we have the pediatric specialties involved,” Johnson said. “This was not seen in 30 weeks of her pregnancy. Now it’s detected.
“It might have been a terrible surprise at delivery.”
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