He is a very relaxed little guy.
It's almost like he's like, I've been through some stuff.
And this is nothing.
The little guy who's been through some stuff
is Elliot, the one between his brothers, Frank and Ian.
Lesson five months ago, Elliot had major heart surgery.
His care at American family, Children's Hospital
started months before he was even
born with a multidisciplinary cadre of expert caregivers.
So we had...
the initial anatomy scan and Ian and Franklin checked out great.
They looked great.
And then I know it wasn't good when three doctors came in
after the scan and sat down and said,
I think we need to get your husband on the phone.
To move forward,
and then have this next set of information,
which is Elliot's heart, transposition
of the great arteries.
It was like, wow, now we've really
got something to work out, work for and work hard at.
Transposition of the great arteries
is a life threatening heart defect
where the two main arteries of the heart are reversed.
Eliot also had a hole between the lower
chambers of his heart.
He would require major, complex surgery
shortly after his birth.
Think about delivering a baby,
and how emotional that whole experience is.
A newborn baby you're so excited.
And then all of a sudden to realize that your baby has
a critical heart defect, that now you
have to understand the fact that he needs
surgery, the lifelong implications.
It's a lot of information, whereas if you
have prenatal diagnosis, we tell you the same thing,
but you have the time to prepare. The amount of stress that
was taken away from us because we
could have these conversations with these people,
they could answer our questions.
See, this is his pulmonary artery.
When we met with Dr. Srinivasan,
she would so thoroughly explain everything that I felt
I knew exactly what was wrong.
And she always drew diagrams.
She took the time every single meeting to recap.
what was wrong with Elliot, Dr. Srinivasan and an entire team
of caregivers developed a plan for a successful birth
of the triplets.
Now the next step, Dr. Petros Anagnostopoulus
and his team closed the hole and repaired the arteries
in Elliot's heart. Getting to meet with him
and hear about all of the procedures that he's done
and his success rate and getting to hear about all of that,
and just knowing we're in really great hands.
You have to flip the great vessels,
but you also have to move the coronary arteries.
And that's the difficulty of this operation.
If you get that right, then the physiology of the kid
is, for the most part, fixed, and they do very well.
After we got through the surgery,
I felt like I could breathe again.
Because there were definitely some days in there
where we just had no idea if he was going
to make it out of the hospital.
Elliot's surgery went well.
He'll have a cardiac team with him through adulthood,
his long term outlook is excellent.
And there's a great chance he may not need surgery again.
Seeing my wife,
so happy after what she's accomplished. Seeing my older son kiss his baby
brothers and seeing each one of them smile,
it's worth everything.
It's worth all the hard work.
And I definitely want him to be aware of everything
he went through.
And I kind of want to tell him, you're a survivor,
you can do anything because look at what you did by the time
you were eight weeks old.