Eli's Story: 'You would not know he has ever had any breathing issues'

Video Transcript

Nana Ampem, Eli's mother: "My name is Nana Serwaa Ampem."

Sam Boateng, Eli's father: "My name is Sam. Nana is my wife. We're both from Ghana."

Nana: "We're blessed to have a baby, Eli, and we had complications with the pregnancy. The 25th week, I went into active labor."

Sam: "Professionally, I'm a clinical pharmacist. Being a health worker, I knew some of the things that he was up against. It was kind of stressful."

Nana: "It was over 8 weeks. And they couldn't get him off the vent. I asked the neonatologist: 'How do things look?' He told me: 'He has BPD.'"

Text: Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia, or "BPD" - A chronic lung disease that can affect the lungs, heart and airway of premature babies.

Nana: "The BPD team was amazing. It was like, they are proud of your family and were able to give their all to help your child get better."

Erik Hysinger, MD, MS, Co-Director, BPD Center: "It's a really exciting moment to be able to take the baby home for the first time, be able to go home and be a family."

Melissa House, MD, Neonatologist: "Cincinnati Children's BPD Center is a multidisciplinary clinic. We follow all of our patients after they're discharged in our outpatient center. The definite benefits to our outpatient clinic is that the physicians who are involved in the patients while they're admitted are also involved after they're discharged to ensure that we're optimizing their healthcare."

Dr. Hysinger: "We know the parents, we know the kids, and you can have a longstanding relationship with them. Really, it's one that can build trust between the medical group and for the parents."

Julie Niles, RN, Program Coordinator, BPD Center: "When the family is going home, they have a lot of questions. We let them know that it's completely normal to have questions, that we're there whenever they need us. It's our goal to keep these babies safe and healthy at home."

Nana: "Ongoing care he's receiving has been really great. Any time we went to the clinic, the BPD team, they were just so happy for Eli."

Dr. Hysinger: "What we're really trying to do with the outpatient clinic is trying to bring that large, multidisciplinary clinic so that the kids can come one time to see the medical team. The goal for this clinic is to maximize the growth, the development and the respiratory and heart health for these kids as they graduate from the NICU and then move into school age and then beyond that. The advanced imaging technology that we have allows better understanding of their heart, lung and airway disease, and then that can help guide treatment."

Nana: "Eli's doing amazing. He is very active. You would not know he has ever had any breathing issues."

Sam: "We've always said that Eli is our miracle. We call him our little miracle."

(Published June 2019)