Infant needs open heart surgery, parent seeks assistance
She’s only a few weeks old but she is facing open-heart surgery next week. Little Giselle Dennison was born with a heart defect that requires urgent attention and her family is asking the community to help them meet their travel costs. News Five spoke with her pediatrician and her very concerned mother today.
On December twenty-ninth at three a.m. baby Giselle Dennison was born. But soon after her birth, the baby was diagnosed with a life threatening heart condition, Cyanosis or what is locally referred to as “Blue Baby.” It is caused when there is no separation of the right and left ventricles.
Dr. Victor Rosado, Pediatrician, K.H.M.H.
“What this does is that both arterial and venous blood mixes so there is no way she can get purely oxygenated blood being pumped out of the left side of the heart. Hence the bluish colour that the baby takes on.”
Normally blood flows to the heart through the right auricle then travels to your right ventricle to reach the lungs to get some oxygen before flowing back to the left auricle and into the left ventricle and then moves throughout the body with oxygen.
Dr. Victor Rosado
“Now surgically speaking it is very difficult because they have to create a wall to separate both the right from the left ventricles. It’s not just to patch a hole it’s actually creating a wall. These surgeries are usually done in steps not one single surgery but a number of surgeries… very complicated case.”
If baby Dennison does not get urgent medical attention, she will die. However, thanks to Dr. Rosado, the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital and some very good friends in the United States, baby Dennison, in the company of her mother, Alison Broaster, will be leaving Belize Monday to get the help she desperately needs. Three weeks ago, Broaster says she did not know what would happen when she first heard about her baby’s condition.
Alison Broaster, Mother
“I just never know what to do, so I start to cry and I start ask the doctor a lot of questions about what to do and so. All they said is that she will get two surgeries when we reach across there we will really know what are the chances we will be taking. But it will be a chance either or either. If she gets it she can live, if she does not she cannot live.”
While the family has received a lot of assistance from the K.H.M.H., Broaster says she will need additional funds to cover whatever expenses may occur. If you would like to assist the Broaster family you can reach Alison Broaster at twenty-one Lovely Lane.
