Vital Signs
Motherly intuition and care at INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center save life of young boy suffering from heart condition
Braxton Shields totes energy and excitement with him when he walks into a room.
With a big smile and eyes beaming from behind his rimmed glasses, the six-year-old states that his favorite toys include race cars and monster trucks.
He quickly rattles off the names of 10 different dinosaurs. He loves sweet tea and enjoys playing the drums.
He looks like another healthy kindergarten student packed with vigor and ready to take on the world.
But scans of his heart and heartbeat show a different story. Braxton suffers from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease in which the heart muscle becomes thick and has increased difficulty pumping blood.
His brother Jeremy suffered from an enlarged heart as a child and passed away from the condition at just 17 months old — before Braxton was born.
Luckily his mother Ashley Lee was quick to recognize similar symptoms in Braxton. Her intuition and the emergency care he received at INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center helped save his life prior to his official diagnosis at the age of one.
“If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know,” Ashley said about her son’s condition. “That’s what his doctor was saying about cardiomyopathy. The kids don’t look sick on the outside, but his EKG and his echo(cardiogram) show there is something wrong.”
The “Home Run For Life” series returns for 2019 as the Oklahoma City Dodgers and INTEGRIS partner to recognize their first honoree of the season — six-year-old Shields — Friday at Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark.
“Home Run For Life” honors individuals in the Oklahoma City community who have overcome a significant medical event with the help of their families, physicians and health care professionals. To symbolize the end of their battle against adversity, honorees take a home run “lap” around the bases during an in-game ceremony.
“Five times a season we are proud to welcome these extraordinary Oklahomans to take the field at Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark,” OKC Dodgers President/General Manager Michael Byrnes said. “This is the ninth straight year we have partnered with INTEGRIS to honor these amazing individuals’ perseverance and courage to overcome major health challenges.”
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Flashback several years to when Ashley’s first son Jeremy appeared to have come down with a severe stomach virus.
“We took him to the ER in central Oklahoma and he just progressively got worse,” Ashley said. “We were admitted waiting on his pediatrician. Well, we didn’t get that far. She got there when he was coding and I knew when they were getting us alone that they were telling us he was dying.”
Jeremy suffered from an enlarged heart and tragically passed away before he turned 1 ½ years old.
About one year later, Ashley was pregnant with Braxton.
Two days after his birth, an echocardiogram showed his heart was in good health.
“It was a perfect baby heart,” Ashley said. “Braxton grew just the way he was supposed to and he was advanced at everything. He sat up, walked and talked earlier than he was supposed to.”
Then at church one morning after his first birthday, Braxton appeared to be suffering from a terrible stomach virus.
Ashley had a sinking feeling. Braxton displayed the same symptoms as Jeremy.
“I recognized the signs immediately,” she said.
Ashley knew they had to get to a well-equipped emergency facility as soon as possible and drove to INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City.
Soon they were in the care of Emergency Room Physician David Fish, M.D.
“I went in there and said he’s in heart failure,” Ashley said. “They were like, ‘ma’am, ma’am,’ because I am sure all of these people come in with their kids saying crazy stuff to get them seen. Once I told her how I knew he was in heart failure she got up, went and got a triage nurse and we were checked in and seeing Dr. Fish immediately. That, I think, is in turn what saved his life — that it was all so quick.”
Dr. Fish remembers Braxton well.
“Finding that 1 in 10,000 patient who has vomiting who also has heart failure is really difficult, which is why it is important to listen and the mom certainly helped us cue into that,” he said. “The other thing I remember that gave us a clue about Braxton, he was in some respiratory distress…so that gave us a clue something else was going on here.”
Ashley said an X-ray was performed showing Braxton had an enlarged heart.
“Turns out, his heart was the same size as mine,” she said. “I thought right then this is the last time I’m going to see him. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I know how this is going to go. Dr. Fish assured me that that wasn’t happening. The nursing staff came in and prayed with us and I felt maybe he was going to live.”
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Fast forward to now. Braxton is full of life, living in Bessie, Okla.
His condition is manageable with medication and regular checkups. His heart is back to normal size and is functioning well.
“I can’t run too much,” Braxton said about his limitations, which include playing competitive sports.
“Heat exhaustion is a really big scare,” Ashley said. “But he is really good at monitoring himself. He knows when he needs to take a break and when it is time to rest.”
Ashley sent Dr. Fish a thank you card, which he has framed in his home office.
“I cried when he told me that because I didn’t know that,” she said. “We went and saw him when Braxton was two and just had a regular check-up…He came out and I said, ‘I don’t know if you remember us’ and kind of started crying. He said, ‘yes I do.’ There were a lot of people involved, but definitely when I think of a reason that he is alive, I think of Dr. Fish.
“Without Dr. Fish and his team at the INTEGRIS Emergency Department our lives would be very different. I would have buried both of my sons and would be visiting two headstones instead of one.”
