In his short five months, Michael van Wyk has had two heart attacks, a severe case of heart palpitations and several bad infections.
He has flown in a helicopter and an air ambulance in a desperate effort to get him to the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Cape Town, but on Wednesday his relieved mother said that finally her son was doing well.
Michael had surgery to fix a life-threatening heart defect on Tuesday.
“Michael is doing well,” his mother, Talitha Kruger, said.
“The doctors are happy. They want to start his milk again today, but they must first wean him off all the other medications.
“They are also working on getting him off the ventilator.
“He is heavily sedated, but when he hears our voices he cries in his sleep,” she said.
“We still can’t believe that the operation is over and that it was such a big success.”
Kruger said she did not know when she and Michael would be coming home yet.
Michael was born with a huge hole in his heart caused by a condition called atrioventricular septal defect.
The holes are between the right and left sides of the heart and also affect the valves that control the flow of blood between these chambers, which may not be formed correctly.
This is putting him at high risk of heart failure, but he has also suffered a collapsed lung and sepsis.
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.
He was flown to Cape Town in April – first by helicopter, and then after the aircraft had to turn around due to inclement weather, he was transported by air ambulance.