By Deb Kroon
Murray County News Staffwriter
February is National Heart Awareness Month and Congenital Heart Defects (CHDs) are one of America’s most common birth defects. CHD is a problem with the structure of the heart that is present at birth. It results when the heart or blood vessels near the heart don’t develop normally before birth. Each year, congenital heart defects impact 40,000 babies in the United States, over 25% of whom need at least one invasive surgery in their lifetime.
On February 13, 2017, Mike and Melissa Einck gave birth to their second beautiful baby girl – Molly. Along with her older sister Mari, the family numbered four. Molly was born with CHD, Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, and began the fight for her life. Over the next couple of years, she spent many days and nights in the hospital in Sioux Falls, SD, in Minneapolis and C.S Mott’s Children’s Hospital in Michigan. Molly underwent 5 open heart surgeries and many other procedures. Exhausting every other possibility, Molly needed a heart transplant.
Molly went to Children’s Minneapolis where she was put on the transplant list. “Accommodations at the hospital are really bad,” said Mike. “There were around 36 rooms on Molly’s floor and 11 on the next floor-these were just heart kids,” Mel went on. “There was a Ronald McDonald House on the third floor. They had 15 beds for the whole hospital, so there were only a few beds allotted the heart patient families. Families got to stay there according to how sick your child as if they had a procedure, or how far from home you were. It was a day to day thing. Families had to put in for a room for the next night. There were no guarantees. We basically lived out of Molly’s closet. If we didn’t get a room in the hospital, we tried to get a hotel room which was full most of the time. Mike has a cousin, Roger, who lives in St. Michael but that was 1/2 hour away. We were on the list for the permanent Ronald McDonald House, 5 miles from Molly, for 50 days until we got in.” “It was so frustrating,” said Mike. “Sometimes, anywhere was too far. 5 miles could take a 1/2 hour with the traffic.” Some nights they would just stay in Molly’s room, which wasn’t very large, and there were two nurses in the room twenty-four hours a day, along with 4-5 machines. There was a very uncomfortable chair and couch in her room, but it was always very busy and noisy, making sleep impossible.
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