Video Story
Watch VideoBoy's survival called a miracle
Story By: Bea Karnes
Source: NBC
He went from a perfectly healthy 6-year-old boy to one struggling to survive. His family says it was the combination of the right care and an outright miracle.
T.J. Pfannenstiel looks like a typical little boy, full of energy; but two weeks ago it was a different story.
“He kept saying my heart hurts, my heart hurts,” says father Tim Pfannenstiel. “We thought it was because he'd had the flu." His family took him to Children's Hospital of Omaha. "Within about an hour of his arrival, his cardiac function deteriorated into cardiac failure," says Dr. Jeff DeMare.
Doctors performed CPR for an hour-and-a-half. “All we kept hearing was we're still doing CPR, we're still doing CPR," says Tim. When CPR wasn't working, doctors turned to a machine called an ECMO (Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation), which took the blood from T.J.’s body, pumped it out, served as his heart and lungs and then pumped the blood back in, buying doctors more time. "What we had was time for his body to get better and that's exactly what happened, his heart got better," says Dr. DeMare.
T.J. was diagnosed with a viral infection in his heart, a very serious condition. "He would have died, not could, would have, his heart was squeezing, but there was no blood exiting the heart, so no heart, no life," says Dr. DeMare.
"The scariest part of it was every time they opened his eyes and shined the flashlight in it to see they would never dilate, nothing would change, so we didn't know if he was our buddy,” says Tim.
With the help of doctors, T.J.’s will to survive and what everyone calls a miracle, just two weeks after almost dying, T.J. was ready to go home.
“Yeah, to play the Wii finally and see my cat," says T.J.
"It's rare that we get to take a kid who was for all practical purposes dead and he's not going to walk out of the hospital, he's going to run out of the hospital today,” says Dr. DeMare.
“Everything was thrown against him and he beat every odd," says Tim.
T.J. is now back home. Doctors say he shouldn't need any further treatment, just a checkup.
