Who knew binging on medical dramas can actually save a person’s life?
It’s the dream of a lot of married couples, to be blessed with children of their own, and Dr. Doaa Saleh and her husband, Ali, were ecstatic to find out they were pregnant again!
However, that joy was short-lived when they received devastating news from their doctor.
The ultrasound at 20 weeks showed that their baby girl had a life-threatening heart defect. She was diagnosed with hypoplastic right heart syndrome. It was a rare heart condition and is found in 1 in 10,000 pregnant women. According to National Institute of Health website, “it is caused by underdevelopment of the structures on the right side of the heart (tricuspid valve, right ventricle, pulmonary valve, and pulmonary artery) and commonly associated with the atrial septal defect. The underdeveloped right side of the heart is unable to provide enough blood flow to the body, leading to low blood oxygen and cyanosis.
“We may lose her in the pregnancy or soon after the pregnancy,” Dr. Saleh remembers her doctors telling her and her husband. “It was devastating news for every mother.”
And, to make matters worse, her doctors in Dubai, where she and her family were based, were unable to do anything at that point.
A lot of people would have given up defeated, after hearing this news, but Dr. Saleh and her husband were determined to find a solution to keep their baby girl alive. And this is where her love for the medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy, helped.
She remembered there was an episode where Dr. Arizona Robbins (played by Jessica Capshaw) and Dr. Andrew deLuca (played by Giacomo Giannotti) preformed surgery on a pregnant woman in utero.
So she and her husband looked for a medical team who could the same and they did, 7,000 miles away in Cleveland, Ohio. They found Dr. James Strainic, a University Hospitals pediatric cardiologist and surgeon at the Congenital Heart Collaborative at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital in the same city.
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But the distance wasn’t a deterrent for this family and they flew 22 hours to Cleveland, Ohio, a city they don’t know.
Dr. Strainic was going to perform a surgery called fetal pulmonary valvuloplasty. It’s a procedure that’s quite similar to the one performed on the show, where they guide a needle through the mother’s abdomen and into the baby girl’s heart.
“And the way we do that is with a really small balloon,” Dr. Strainic explained. “It’s only about 3-4 mm in size. We blow up the balloon and it kind of rips open the door and we prevent something called hypoplastic right ventricle, or half-of-a-heart syndrome.”
Although the procedure is an option for them, it’s also a procedure that’s risky. About 10% of the babies in utero die during the procedure.
That’s why Dr. Strainic also offers surgery after the baby is born as an option.
“We reserve this only for the fetuses that we are pretty sure are going to develop that half-a-heart syndrome,” Dr. Strainic said.
And thankfully, the procedure was a success with Dr. Saleh’s and her baby girl, who they later named Nadine.
“I could’ve never imagined that Grey’s Anatomy could literally change my baby’s life,” Dr. Saleh said. “That it could save [her]!”
Nadine is now a healthy and happy toddler and her doctors have dubbed her a miracle baby.
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Since then, Dr. Saleh has shared their experience on social media. She has been using it as a platform to bring more awareness to Nadine’s condition. And she also uses her social media accounts to advocate for Hearts of Hope, which provides life-saving heart surgeries for babies born in critical conditions.
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Watch the video below to learn more about this Grey’s Anatomy superfan and how it helped save her baby’s life.
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