A desperate race against time to save one of Nelson Mandela Bay’s tiniest cardiac patients took a dramatic turn on Thursday when the flight with the four-month-old made it halfway to Cape Town – only to return to Port Elizabeth, leaving his anguished mom waiting for him in the Mother City.
Doctors, paramedics, senior department officials and pilots spent most of Thursday trying to find a solution to get the baby to the Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Cape Town for life-saving surgery.
It was confirmed last night that he will finally arrive this morning.
After two heart attacks, several bad infections and a life-threatening episode earlier this week, little Michael van Wyk, weighing barely 2kg, had been considered stable enough to be flown to Cape Town on Thursday morning.
Michael was born with a huge hole in his heart.
As no interventions could be done because the catheterisation laboratory (cathlab) at Port Elizabeth’s Provincial Hospital had been broken since his birth, all doctors could do was help him hold on for dear life in the intensive care unit at Dora Nginza Hospital.
On Sunday, Michael’s heart started beating abnormally fast at 300 beats a minute and he had to be placed back on a ventilator to help him breathe.
“He is basically skin and bone now,” his mother, Talita Kruger, said.
“We are scared that his little body can’t handle all the stress.”
On Thursday morning, the pilot of the highly specialised emergency medical services’ (EMS) helicopter, Aeromed 2, a paramedic and a doctor fetched Michael for his flight to Cape Town at 8am, but – not even an hour later – they had to turn around and head home due to bad weather.Metro EMS head Brenhan Metune confirmed that they had to abort the flight midway due to weather conditions and would have to put Michael on a fixed wing aircraft to get him to Cape Town.Meanwhile, Kruger had been flown to Cape Town by the Port Elizabeth-based Wings and Wishes organisation at 9.40am because there had been no space for her on the helicopter.Michael could not be flown on a commercial flight because of his condition.Kruger said from the Cape Town Airport that she was grateful for all that the Eastern Cape department of health was doing to help them.“The helicopter had problems in George and they went back to Port Elizabeth,” she said.“We are very excited. This isthe day we have been waiting for. Michael is doing much better. He is off the ventilator and only on nasal tubes now.“They are really trying everything to help us. It is not their fault.“The department of health has really gone out of its way to help us.”Kruger said she had received confirmation on Thursday night that Michael would arrive in Cape Town on Friday morning.Michael suffers from a condition called atrioventricular septal defect (AVSD) – a heart defect in which there are holes between the chambers of the right and left sides of the heart, and the valves that control the flow of blood between these chambers may not be formed correctly.This is putting him at high risk of heart failure.So far, he has had to battle sepsis and a collapsed lung.He has been in the intensive care unit at Dora Nginza Hospital for the past two months.Inge Human, from Wings and Wishes, said every child deserved expert medical care.“In South Africa, many families simply cannot afford to transport their critically ill children to hospital to receive specialised care.“For many, Wings and Wishes is the only consistent hope that these critically ill children will be able to receive the medical care they so desperately need.“Wings and Wishes is committed to ensuring that these children have a second chance at a healthy life,” she said.