Jack Jensen and his mom at Radiothon 2010

 Jack Jensen, Frederick, MD

When Jack Jensen was born in August 2007 he had a condition called congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH), where the diaphragm is missing or only partly formed. This condition allows the stomach, intestines, liver, kidneys and spleen to move up in the chest cavity and push against the heart and lungs, pressing and damaging the organs, and leading to breathing and circulation problems.

HEAR Jack’s parent talk about his journey on Radiothon 2010 

Fifty percent of children born with this condition die from it. Jack was diagnosed in-utero during a routine ultrasound when his mother Vicki was 19 weeks pregnant. The Jensens searched for a hospital that could operate on Jack after birth to repair his diaphragm and also place him on the high-risk but life-saving bridge-to-life machine called ECMO.

Hopkins Children’s is the only facility in the State of Maryland with an organized and recognized program to provide ECMO to children and newborns. ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and takes over heart and lung functions for patients too sick to do so on their own.

The Jensens ended up at Hopkins Children’s, where Jack was placed on ECMO after being delivered to stabilize him so he could successfully go through the surgery to repair his malformed diaphragm.

But since patients on ECMO receive blood thinners to ward off stroke from blood clots, Jack couldn’t undergo surgery because the blood thinners put him at extremely high risk for bleeding out during surgery.

Ten days into ECMO, however, Jack was not progressing enough to be taken off the machine. Pediatric surgeon Fizan Abdullah, M.D., decided to move forward with the surgery regardless of the risks. Abdullah successfully reconstructed his partially missing diaphragm using an artificial Gortex plastic patch.

Nearly a month after she gave birth to her son, Vicki held him in her arms for the first time.

Vicki says that when Jack grows up, “I’ll tell him that he’s the strongest person I’ve met in my life. I don’t know any adult who could have made it through that,” she says. “I’ll tell him how, when he was born, he proved that he could do anything.”