Jacob Watton Jacob Daniel Watton

Welcome to our CaringBridge site. We've created it to keep friends and family updated. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement during this time when it matters most.

At 20 weeks pregnant, we learned we would have a baby boy. We also found out that day that he has heart defects, but that they would be repairable. Jacob Daniel was born April 1st.  After delivery he was transferred to Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and has remained there since. He had a BT shunt surgery at about 36 hours old, one of the surgeries we had expected him to have, but earlier than we expected. About 12 hours after that surgery, he suffered a cardiac arrest. His nurse saved his life and did CPR for 40 minutes until they were able to re-open his chest and get him on life support. He has remained on life support since, with unsuccessful attempts so far to take him off. His heart defects are more complicated than they were able to diagnose prenatally. He has tetralogy of Fallot with an unbalanced AV canal defect. Since the AV canal defect is unbalanced, they are treating him also as a single ventricle patient. He is too sick to be listed for a heart transplant at this time. The doctors don't feel he would be able to handle any surgery at this time. So now we wait and see if he can make some progress to determine the next steps.