Patient Stories

Riley Grace: Video-Assisted Thorascopic Repair for PDA
She weighed only 1 pound 7 ounces when she was born, and developed PDA, a chronic lung condition and a condition in which a blood vessel failed to close normally after birth.
Read Riley Grace's Story

Lily: Treating CHARGE Syndrome
Lily's complex condition required an integrated, multidisciplinary team of specialists to handle multiple heart surgeries, infections and repairing her cleft lip and palate.
Read Lily's Story

Olivia: Research Helps Save Infant's Vision
After being born preterm at 25 weeks, Olivia developed retonopathy of prematurity, a common complication and leading cause of retinal detachment and blindness in premature infants.
Read Olivia's Story

YuXiu: Cardiac Catheterization for VSD
One percent of the world's population is born with heart disease, and many of those children born outside of the United States go undiagnosed. YuXiu is among the lucky ones.
Read YuXiu's Story

Carl: Brain Surgery Eliminates Epilepsy
Carl tried eight different medication regimens that failed to stop the seizures and was in status epilepticus seven times that his parents were aware of, until a surgery helped him.
Read Carl's Story

Evan: Cerebral Folate Deficiency
Diagnosing Evan's CFD was a game-changer. "We went to three hospitals and over 30 specialists before Dr. Frye and Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital gave us our child back."
Read Evan's Story

Tristen: Back in the Saddle
Standing on a trailer, five-year-old Tristen began waving her arms to shoo her horses away. Spooked by the motion, one of the horses caught Tristen with a hoof to the left side of the chest.
Read Tristen's Story   

Hunter Makes Up for Lost Time
Hunter arrived in the world a blue baby - without a diaphragm he couldn't breathe.
Read Hunter's Story

Gavin: The EXIT Procedure
In 2007, a team of 15 highly trained medical staff used a rarely required but critical procedure to transform a potentially disastrous delivery into a safe birth. Today, the infant who benefited from the procedure is approaching his third birthday.
Read Gavin's Story

Hayden: Airway Reconstruction
Hayden's breathing and eating problems were a mystery to his family. When he was 9 months old, they took him to a specialist, who discovered scar tissue causing the problem.
Watch Hayden's Story

Jonathan: Sudden Cardiac Arrest Stuns Football Team
On a Spring day in a south Houston suburb, Jonathan Moore had just begun football practice when the fullback suddenly began gasping for breath. Moments later, he lay unconscious on the field.
Read Jonathan's Story

Triston: Heart Procedure Helps Gymnast Continue Olympic Quest
At 13 years old, Triston Marez was on his way to becoming an Olympic-level gymnast; however, he had one obstacle stopping him -- holes in his heart.
Read Triston's Story

Lindsey: Giving back the love she received
Just weeks into her pregnancy, Lindsey experienced complications that led to 61 days of bed rest in the hospital. She thanks the Women's Center staff and support from the March of Dimes for helping her through.
Read Lindsey's Story

Garret: One Lucky Boy
12-year-old Garret Mullikin was on vacation with his family when he decided to ride his friend's new dirt bike. He lost control on a hill, crashing into a tree branch. The branch pierced Garret through his neck.
Watch Garret's Story

Luke: Battling epilepsy and winning
"When we met Dr. Baumgartner, he told us, 'I can't imagine being a parent and listening to a doctor tell me that he wanted to remove a portion of my child's brain,'" his mom remembers.
Read Luke's Story

Amy makes a fast comeback
Mark remembers the details of the day clearly. On the morning of Jan. 1, his daughter Amy called from Mexico and proudly announced that she'd just learned to ride a four-wheeler. It was 5 p.m. when Mark got the call from the emergency clinic.
Read Amy's Story

Katie's Battle With A Mitochondrial Disorder
Before being treated by Mary Kay Koenig, M.D., five-year-old Katie lived a life of daily seizures, developmental deficits and repeat visits to specialists who had no answers. Just months after beginning treatment, she could talk and run for the first time in her life.
Read Katie's Story

Meredith: Becoming the One Comforted
Meredith, an expectant mom and Clinical Nurse Manager in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), went into labor at 36 weeks. She never imagined that her new baby would become a patient at her very own hospital.
Read Meredith's Story

Zoe: Learning to Thrive
Like her three siblings, Zoe was born with delayed gastric emptying (DGE). It later became evident she also suffered from obstructive sleep apnea. Now, she is learning to thrive.
Read Zoe's Story

Grant: Cleft Lip and Palate Surgeries
At 20 weeks pregnant, Mandy's 3D ultrasound revealed her child would be born with a cleft lip.
Read Grant's Story                                                      

Leigh Ann Breen: From Patient to Provider
Leigh Ann Breen, Child Life specialist at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital, says that her mother always told her, "You don't have a disability. You have a different ability."
Read Leigh Ann's Story

Yvan: Keep the Faith
"We virtually lived at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital in 2005," says Yvan's mother, Arlene, who ran her day spa and yoga studio business and exchanged marriage vows with her husband at the hospital that year.
Read Yvan's Story