No matter what, you can overcome

The rosy beginnings of Mordechai’s life began to fade at the three-month mark when the pediatrician was unhappy that he wasn’t gaining weight. At a thorough four-month examination, the doctor detected a heart murmur.

“He didn’t tell us Mordechai had a murmur,” Joyce remembers. “He just sent us to do a chest X-ray. This was on a Thursday night. I was completely numb, overwhelmed, in shock; it was so sudden.” The X-ray showed an abnormality in Mordechai’s heart, and the presence of fluid in his tiny lungs.

The next day, Joyce and her husband, Avraham, found themselves at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, booked for an ultrasound, an echocardiogram, and finally, an appointment with a pediatric cardiologist. “While they were doing the ultrasound, the technician kept going over his chest, again and again. We could see that she was concerned. We started to think that he had a hole in his heart.”

Congenital heart defects are fixable, and in many instances, self-repair over time, the Morels comforted themselves. Holding on to a thin strand of optimism, they sat across from the doctor on that fateful Friday morning, hoping for the best.

“You have a sick child,” the doctor intoned, opting for the honest, if brutal, approach. “And no matter what we do, we’re never going to be able to fix him.”

They then heard the diagnosis: Little Mordechai had a variation of hypoplastic left heart. Instead of four chambers, his heart had three.

Their lives would never be the same again.

Everyone was so supportive

“My husband and I just looked at each other, and I remember my tears falling. The doctor’s words were like a slap in the face. But his diagnosis was 100 percent correct.”

Only later would the Morels discover that with the extent of his defects, Mordechai had a 5 percent chance of surviving his first year. With one of the ventricles missing, his single pumping chamber had to do the work of two — and it was the larger ventricle that was absent, creating an overwhelmed and ineffective cardiac system. As oxygenated blood got pumped back to Mordechai’s heart, the faulty architecture caused it to be mixed up with the unoxegynated blood, which then got pumped back through his body.

Mordechai’s oxygen saturation was woefully low, leaving him tired and weak so that even eating was too much for him. Overnight, Joyce had to become a skilled nurse, as the baby needed to be tube-fed, first by a nasogastric tube, which needed to be changed every few days, and then by a gastric tube, which pumped liquid nutrition directly into his stomach.

The operating room became a familiar sight. Mordechai’s first surgery was done when he was five months old, and would be followed by three more heart surgeries — two of them open-heart — and dozens of other interventions. Mordechai’s name was augmented with the prayerful “Alter” after a particularly harrowing medical scare. But despite all efforts, he was still in congestive heart failure. His heart was failing to pump properly.

The outpouring of support, love, and practical, hands-on chesed of the Toronto community was inspiring. “Everyone was so supportive, everyone was sensitive to our needs. People did car pools, made food for the family, brought us food in the hospital every single day. It was just incredible!” Joyce says. “There was so much compassion and understanding in countless, critical ways.