Best Heart

Baby Miles was very sick. Could a risky new heart procedure save his life?

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A Vortex of Tubes

Adrian Coulson and his wife, Leigh, were still adjusting to the sleep-deprived but happy chaos of life with a newborn and a toddler when two-week-old Miles got sick. Leigh, 32, a crime-victim social worker, and Adrian, 36, a music teacher and band director in the public schools of Dixon, a Northern California town of 16,000, were on leave from their jobs.

Leigh and her 21-month-old, Matthew, had both been sick the week before, with a low fever, fatigue and mouth sores. They recovered, and she figured it was just another harmless virus. But now Miles seemed to be coming down with it: He was sleeping more than usual, and eating less. On the morning of April 14, 2004, he woke before dawn but barely nursed. Miles had been a big, hungry baby who never missed a feeding. When Adrian went to check on Miles in his crib and found that his arms and legs were cold, even though it was warm in the house, he knew something was seriously wrong. Miles's skin was mottled, with strange red and white splotches.

By the time they arrived at their pediatrician's office next to Sutter Davis Hospital, Miles was struggling to breathe. He looked so vulnerable in his little onesy. Adrian recalls, "We could see his chest working hard." The doctor examined him and then went with Leigh and Adrian to take Miles straight to the emergency room.

Alerted by the pediatrician, a team of doctors and nurses whisked Miles away for a chest x-ray and a spinal tap. They determined he needed more specialized care, so in his car seat strapped to a stretcher, with an oxygen mask over his face, he was rushed to another Sutter hospital, in Sacramento.

There, the Coulsons found themselves living every parent's worst nightmare as their blue-eyed boy was swept into a vortex of tubes, needles and machines wielded by doctors and nurses they'd never met. Behind their protective masks were grim faces. "Your child is very sick." The words still echo in Leigh's mind. "They never sugarcoated it," she says. "They never said he would be all right."

Soon after arriving in Sacramento, Miles was put on a respirator. His heart, the doctors told Leigh and Adrian, was dangerously enlarged and very weak. Whatever virus he had contracted might have attacked his heart muscle. Leigh recalls feeling shocked and devastated: "It looked like he might die that night."

Photo: © Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle