Bryce's Story
- By Stacey

I just remember being in total shock. How could our baby be so sick if they were ready to send him up to the ward with me two hours earlier, but worst of all how do we tell Tori and Riley that their baby brother was so sick.

Telling them was so hard, the look on their little faces was unbearable, I just wanted to curl up in a ball on the bed with them and hold them. But we had so many plans to make. My sister Susie and her husband took Tori and Riley home with them(saying good-bye was soooo hard). We then organized my discharge from the Geelong Hospital(the docs were very reluctant to do this, but I told them I was leaving whether they agreed or not).

By this time the NETS team had arrived and were stablizing Bryce for the trip to Melbourne. This took close to three hours. He was hooked up to a ventilator.  Our parents stayed with us until Bryce was ready to be transported. Watching strangers take my newborn son away hurt so much. I didn’t think I could ever feel worse than I did right then.

When we got to RCH we went straight to EMD. There we saw an ambulance pull up. It was the NETS van with Bryce inside. Everyone in emerg stared as they pulled the crib carrying Bryce out of the back. I just wanted to yell at them to stop staring at my baby. We left emerg and went with Bryce up to the ICU. We had to wait in another room while they settled Bryce into his place and carried out some tests to see what Bryces condition was.  It seemed to take hours, and all I wanted to do was go and see Bryce.

Finally we were able to go and see our baby. And what a scary sight it was. He had tubes everywhere, and the ventilator. Nothing could have prepared us for that first view of Bryce looking so helpless, surrounded by machines, and the sound of all the alarms going off.

Soon after we were taken up to Andrew Davis’ office. There he and Sophie (Bryces fantastic ICU nurse that night) told us the results of all the tests Bryce had. He thankfully did not have Hypo-plastic Left Heart Syndrome, but he did have a list of other complicated abnormalities. 1, Interrupted Aortic Arch, 2, Double Outlet Right Ventricle,3, Pulmonary and Aortic Stenosis,4, Bi-Cuspid Valve,5, Multiple VSDs as well as some abnormal tissue growth within his heart. On top of that somewhere between Geelong and Melbourne Bryce had suffered a stroke. We didn’t think it could get any worse than this, then Andrew told us of a disease called Necrotizing Enterocolitis, NEC, (a disease caused from lack of blood to the lower body). But at that stage Bryce was clear of it. We were asked if we had questions. My only one was is my baby going to die, and they had to tell me they didn’t know, but if our babies life was a tunnel, there wasn’t very much light at the end of it.

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