Published: June 06, 2008 11:22 am         

Baby boy beats odds, becomes miracle

By Amy Moore

The News staff writer

At three months old, Steven Earl Matthews will soon see something he’s never seen before — his home.

The infant boy has been a resident and patient of the Christus St. Mary Neo-natal ICU since he was born March 4 weighing in at only four pounds, four ounces. While there, Steven beat the odds, despite obstacles adults would have buckled under. Now a healthy nine-pound, cooing, smiling baby boy, Steven and his family are ready to start their lives together.

He will be released from the hospital Friday.

“This is like the big light at the end of the tunnel,” his mother, Angie, of Deweyville, said.

Steven was born eight weeks early at Baptist Hospital in Orange via emergency cesarean section. The Neo-natal ICU (NICU) staff from Christus St. Mary waited nearby to transport the baby to Port Arthur.

“We knew she (Angie) had high blood pressure and placental abruption,” Dr. Nikhil Raval, head of Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine, at St. Mary, said. “She’s lucky we were there.”

Angie was told she would not be able to see her son before he was taken to Port Arthur and before she woke up from the anesthesia.

Steven was born without any signs of life. The tiny newborn had to be resuscitated and stabilized before the trip from Orange to the state-of-the-art NICU facility in Port Arthur

Angie was granted one brief touch of his small foot before he was brought to Port Arthur.

Raval and his team gave Steven a very small chance of survival. His premature lungs were unprepared for life outside the womb and his body began to build acid.

“He was bleeding from his lungs and his survival chances were lower than 15 percent,” Raval said.

In Orange and unable to leave the hospital, Angie said the very first day was the longest of her life.

“It didn’t look good. My family brought me pictures and I just looked through them and prayed the whole time. My husband and parents came to Port Arthur with Steven. All I had done was touch his foot before they wheeled him off,” she said through tears.

In Port Arthur, Steven fought. He showed signs of recovery from the initial complications, but 10 days later, doctors found an infection in Steven’s bowels and he was sent to Houston to a surgical consult. After 15 days, his little body beat the infection and he returned to Port Arthur.

But Steven was still on oxygen and his condition made Raval fear the newborn might suffer severe neurological complications.

Just when Raval and his team met with Angie and her husband, Lynn, to discuss a long-term care facility for their son, Steven again put up a fight against the odds. After months on oxygen, he breathed on his own.

“The progress of the three-month-old is amazing to me. He really is a miracle baby,” Raval said. “It’s very, very rare to see an outcome like this. The important thing is when babies are born and sick, they need expert care and that’s what we try to provide here in this area.”

Steven was not just a patient to the staff of the NICU, he became their surrogate child.

“There was no rhyme or reason why he recovered,” Leslie Dickerson, a nurse, said. “It’s going to be hard (to see him leave) but we’re happy. We’ve claimed his as our own.”

Angie said she’s had to buy the same type of toys that are in the NICU for Steven to make the transfer home an easier one.

“He’s spoiled from the get-go because there were so many days when we couldn’t hold him,” she said. “He was a month old before we could hold him, now it’s hard to put him down. He’s faced so many obstacles and overcome them all.”

Angie said she looks forward to bringing Steven home where his older sister Amy, 11, can finally hold her little brother.

During his stay at St. Mary, Steven earned the titles of longest stay in the NICU and first to ride in the $50,000 NICU transporter when he went to Beaumont to have an eye exam.

     

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