Positivity: Baby’s Recovery Called ‘a Miracle

From Sherman, IL — “Her survival baffles doctors, who gave her virtually no chance”:

Published Sunday, April 29, 2007

SHERMAN - What is it about Ella Maintz, a fair-haired, blue-eyed baby girl just shy of her one-month birthday?
How did someone who was so tiny, so sick, and so close to death three weeks ago fight her way back to being a healthy infant with no sign that she ever had a zero-to-1 percent chance of living?

Was there a higher power watching over her? Was she born with a unique inner strength? Maybe it was a simple matter of biology.

Whatever the reason, baffled doctors and medical professionals here and in St. Louis have proclaimed her recovery nothing short of “a miracle.”

“When they were telling us about the zero to 1 percent chance, we accepted that she wasn’t going to be going home with us and it was just really hard,” said Ella’s father, Bill Maintz. “It was weird … when we finally accepted that, that’s when she started getting well.”

There was nothing out of the ordinary about Ella’s birth April 4 at Memorial Medical Center. She was five days early, but it was nothing that worried Bill or her mother, Kelley. The baby was about six pounds and looked fine.

The first sign that something could be wrong came minutes later when everyone realized Ella’s body temperature was a little cold.

“When she was born, I got to hold her right after they pulled her out and held her down so Kell could kiss her,” Bill Maintz recalled. “She said she was a little cold so they wanted to hold her under some heat. And then it all took off from there.”

Ella was taken to the special care nursery, and Kelley, a registered nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at St. John’s Hospital, was left by herself in her hospital room. After four hours of waiting, she got in a wheelchair and went to see for herself what was happening. Nurses had Ella under a “hood” - basically a plastic bubble over her head, and they predicted she would be fine in the morning, Bill recalled. Mom and Dad could hold her then, nurses told Bill, 33, and Kelley, 32.

The couple went back to the room to get some sleep, but Ella’s condition quickly worsened. Bill and Kelley were given the bad news about 3 a.m. April 5: The baby’s lungs were collapsed and she had hypertension and low blood oxygen. She needed to be flown by helicopter to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis, but doctors did not expect her to live through the flight.

“Everyone kept saying, ‘This is the sickest baby we’ve ever seen,’” Bill Maintz said.

A respiratory therapist on the flight hand-pumped 150 breaths per minute into Ella’s lungs. Once at the hospital, she was put on a machine called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. Usually considered a last resort for the most critically ill children, the machine did the work for Ella’s heart and lungs until they were strong enough to work on their own.

Miracle No. 1: Within a few days, Ella’s condition stabilized. Within a week she gained some weight, could breathe without the machine and was breastfeeding.

“For a child who was unlikely to survive, she’s perfectly normal now,” said Ella’s neonatologist, Dr. Greg Mantych. “As sick as she was, to not only survive, but to be doing very well now, is pretty remarkable.”

Miracle No. 2: Ella will have no lasting effects from the ordeal, medical experts have told Bill and Kelley.

“That was the thing, we just accepted, ‘OK, she’s going to have some kind of brain damage because she was without oxygen for so long,’” Bill Maintz said. “But they’ve completely signed off on her. She’s completely fine. The doctor said she should have damage, but she has no damage. There’s no follow up needed. And there is absolutely no reason why. They can’t explain it.

“She’s got her own rule book. She’s absolutely wonderful.”

Ella returned home Saturday and was welcomed by family members including her big brother, Dalton, 8, and big sister, Raegan, 4. Bill Maintz said Ella is a “very lovely” little girl.

“She knows when she wants to eat. She is very attentive. She is looking all over. She holds her head up. Anybody who comes in the room she holds her head up and follows them around the room. The only time she cries is when she’s hungry,” he said.

The gravity of the situation and Ella’s amazing, unexpected survival are not lost on her parents.

“I’ve never heard ‘miracle’ so often,” Bill Maintz said. “When doctors and nurses are saying, ‘It’s a miracle,’ you know that’s pretty special. They deal with this every day.”