William Jones
September 2015
William was born in July 2014 with Congenital Heart Disease and Down Syndrome, diagnosed during pregnancy. What we didn’t expect was a rapid transfer to Southampton General when he was just 1 week old for urgent surgery for William to survive. William underwent surgery when he was 10 days old to remove the narrowing section of his aorta. William made a fast recovery and after a couple of days was out of paediatric intensive care (PICU) and back on the children’s cardiac ward.
Everything was looking good late November and we were getting ready to be transferred to our local hospital but a few hours later William deteriorated. He went from a happy playful little boy to non responsive in minutes. He was rushed to PICU where on arrival his heart stopped, he needed compressions, intubation, nitric oxide and adrenaline. We were called to the unit to be near William as the team worked on trying to bring our little boy back. It was 36 minutes of down time before we got a response, seconds before the decision to stop CPR was about to be made. I remember sitting there, numb, willing our little boy to fight. As the doctors and nurses stabilised William the consultant came over to talk to us, shaking his head and smiling. I will never forget his words, “that boy has an amazing tenacity to cling onto life, I don’t know how he is still alive”.
All the previous repair work was undone and the surgeon started again, let’s not forget he was working on something the size of a strawberry! It was late that night when we stood in the corridor listening to the surgeon tell us that William was stable, he hadn’t replaced the valve but had managed a better repair on the valve. The best news in a long time. We would now, once again, have to wait and see.
Louise Fetigan says ” Reading some of the Little Trooper of the Month stories puts everything into perspective, so many military families out there are dealing with exceptional real life situations and William has shown he is such a strong Little Trooper in just 15 months he has been through so much. We send all the Jones family all our love and hope William goes from strength to strength. We sent William a voucher for the Early Learning Centre and hope he enjoys his toys”
Williams father is W02 Jones who is currently serving with 29 Regt RLC