Defying the odds, Baby Andrew was born March 21 weighing a healthy 9 pounds, 2 ounces.
“He cried and it was the sweetest sound,” Jennifer said.
But they were hardly out of the woods. Because he was so sick, Baby Andrew was baptized and confirmed upon birth. Surgeons were nearby in case they needed to do emergency open-heart surgery.
“It was dire,” Jennifer said.
At 8 days old, Baby Andrew had his first open-heart surgery, with the doctors trying to avoid an immediate transplant by propping his heart valves open to allow blood to flow through.
He only got worse.
After the surgery, “he was white as a sheet and just lying there,” Jennifer said. “It was horrible.”
That’s when she knew there was no stop-gap fix. Baby Andrew needed a new heart, and he needed it soon.
Around this time of extreme anxiety and fear, Jennifer’s oldest daughter, Katelyn, had a dream where she and Jennifer were at a playground. In the dream, Jennifer told Katelyn to touch her chest, and when she did a hand-drawn heart appeared. Then Jennifer was replaced by the Blessed Mother, whose eyes shone gold.
“The hand-drawn heart turned into the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” Jennifer said, tears filling her eyes as she recounted the story. Then a voice that her daughter had never heard before said: “Don’t worry, your little brother will be OK.”
“That’s amazing,” Jennifer said. “You can’t explain that. You can’t.”
At the beginning of May, Baby Andrew was added to the United Network for Organ Sharing. The weeks of waiting were filled with scary days, Jennifer said, “but at the time I just had to believe it would be OK.
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“Every day I prayed for the perfect heart at the perfect time,” Jennifer said, including a day when she knelt in a church and sobbed.
“I just remember saying, ‘I lay it down Lord, whatever way this goes, I lay it at Your feet,’” she prayed. “‘You know what I want, but it’s up to You.’”
Two days later, on July 1, Jennifer and Andrew received a phone call at 4:30 a.m. Baby Andrew had a donor. It was 19 days after Pentecost Sunday and Jennifer could hardly contain her excitement. July 1 was the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The road to recovery
It seemed God indeed had provided Baby Andrew with “the perfect heart at the perfect time.” In the operating room, his new heart was a perfect fit, and Jennifer now considers the day of Baby Andrew’s transplant as his second birthday.
“After being basically re-born three months later, he has probably caught up to every developmental milestone you could expect,” she said. “We never gave up hope, never gave up prayers, and God saw him through to where he is today.”