Cincinnati Children’s Hospital gives family lifesaving care after other hospitals turned them away
By Daisy Kershaw
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CINCINNATI (WLWT) — When other hospitals turned this family away for care – Cincinnati Children’s not only said yes to taking on their case, but doctors saved their son’s life.
The Ramos family came from Georgia hoping for a miracle, and they got it.
“We were just given bad news after bad news, and at the moment that we met with Dr. Morales, he was the first person that gave us, you know, a light at the end of the tunnel,” says Stephany Ramos, Dylan’s mom.
During Stephany’s pregnancy, the Ramos family found out that their son Dylan has an extremely rare condition.
“He had something called Isomorphism. You know, your right and left body are actually a little bit different, and in isomorphism, someone is either having two right sides or two left sides. That has a lot of effect on the heart. He had probably about 8 or 9 different defects of the heart,” says Dr. David Morales, “In addition, he had very sick lungs.”
Morales heads the Heart Institute at Cincinnati Children’s and is the Chief of Congenital Heart Surgery.
“Other institutions did not feel that they could provide him a good probability of survival,” says Morales.
The team at Children’s used revolutionary virtual reality technology to map his heart and give Dylan a fighting chance.
In April of 2023, right after he was born, Dylan had his first operation.
“We knew that if he was going to survive, we would have to deliver him. right next to the operating room where we’re going to operate, so we could start operating within an hour. Because if not, unfortunately, he might have passed,” Morales explained.
In June of 2023, Morales performed a rare 14-hour surgery.
“They said, you know, it was a high-risk procedure. They couldn’t guarantee anything, but they were willing to try, and that’s all we could ask for,” says Stephany.
In the end, this family’s prayers were answered, and Morales and his team gave their son a functioning heart, giving him a future.
“[Dr. Morales] is a real-life superhero, really. He saved our son,” says Dartagnan Ramos, Dylan’s dad.
This February marks one year since Dylan and his family were cleared by doctors here to head home to Georgia.
It’s a major milestone for the family; they tell us they are incredibly thankful to the team at Children’s Hospital for making this possible.
They say Dylan will need another surgery around the age of eight, and when the time comes, they tell us they will be coming back to Cincinnati Children’s because of the incredible care they received.
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