Austin’s Story

The moment a heart stops

The morning after Austin was born, his doctors took him for some routine testing ... and he never came back to his mother’s delivery room.

The doctors discovered he had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, meaning that his heart was missing the lower left ventricle and he would need corrective surgery to survive. They transferred him to Cincinnati Children’s, where at just 7 days old he underwent the Norwood procedure. Two more surgeries followed before his second birthday—the Glenn and Fontan procedures. Growing up, Austin would get short of breath quickly and had a few major incidents, but otherwise he didn’t let his heart condition get in the way of his everyday life. His everyday life just happened to include regular visits to Cincinnati Children’s.

That is until the day his heart stopped beating as he walked to the dugout between innings of a softball game.

And that’s when his mother, Angela, stepped in. The EMTs wanted to rush him to a nearby hospital, but Angela knew the only people who could properly care for her son’s heart defect were the adult congenital heart specialists at Cincinnati Children’s.

“It wasn’t pretty,” Angela recalled. “I’m calling the hospital, saying, ‘You cannot treat him, you do not have permission to treat my son. You get him on a helicopter and you get him to Children’s.’ So I screamed and yelled until he arrived, and they immediately put him on a helicopter and air-cared him to Children’s.”

Now, Austin tries not to focus on the what-ifs and instead takes comfort in knowing he has the right team in place to care for him in any situation—the team that saved his life and kept him alive to see the birth of his son.

“I think about it, but try not to think about it all at the same time. Because I want to try and be as ‘normal’ health-wise as anyone else, and going to Children’s has made it very easy to do that.”