A newborn baby nearly died following his circumcision at a prestigious New York City medical center, bleeding uncontrollably for more than seven hours as his internal organs began to fail, according to his family.
Some two weeks later, little Cole Jordan Groth remains in the hospital, where he is finally showing some improvement, but is still “definitely not out of the woods by any means,” father Tim Groth told The Independent. Groth said on Monday that Cole is expected to spend “at least a couple of months” in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where he will be fed intravenously due to complications with his intestines.
“Every day gives us a bit more hope, so hopefully that continues,” Groth said. “You just never know, he could have a setback anyday… The surgeon [told us] we have to hope for some ‘boring days’ ahead.”
Cole was born March 31 at New York-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, with congenital cardiac issues. Doctors in the NICU placed a stent in Cole’s heart, after which the infant was considered “one of the healthiest babies on the floor,” his dad wrote in a GoFundMe appeal. At 11 p.m. on April 14, two days before Cole’s scheduled discharge, medical staff asked Tim and wife Gabrielle – Cole’s mom – if they wanted their son to be circumcised.
The Long Island, New York couple agreed to the routine procedure, but claim no one ever told them that circumcision presented a serious bleeding risk for babies with congenital heart disease.
Everything seemed fine for the first two hours after the circumcision, according to a timeline laid out by Tim on his GoFundMe page. Then, around 2:30 a.m., things took a turn for the worse. Cole’s diaper was “full of blood, stool, urine, so full that it had leaked onto the sheets and his leg,” the fundraiser says.
A hospital staffer alerted the nurse practitioner who performed the circumcision that there were problems, and the nurse practitioner rewrapped Cole’s penis with adhesive strips. However, Cole’s condition continued to worsen.
Six hours later, unable to stop the bleeding, doctors intubated Cole, and shortly after 9 a.m., he received an urgent transfusion of 40ml/kg of blood. Babies of this age typically have between 80ml/kg and 90ml/kg of blood in their bodies, meaning Cole lost roughly half the blood in his body, according to Tim.
He said the bleeding led to a frightening series of seizures, along with kidney damage, liver damage and neurological damage.
For the next three days, Cole seemed to be recovering. But, Tim said, at 4 a.m. on April 19, the hospital called and told him and his wife that parts of Cole’s intestines had necrotized and needed to be removed immediately. The 20-day-old baby was rushed into the operating room, where doctors rushed to excise the dead tissue, the family’s GoFundMe page explains.
“He had multiple surgeries, they removed several segments of his intestines,” Tim told The Independent. “The surgeon was able to sew his belly back up, now the hope is that over time, he’ll be able to recover and [that] his body stabilizes. They’re trying to wean him off the pain meds – he’s on Dilaudid and some other significant ones.”
According to Tim, Cole remains in the NICU while he and Gabrielle wait anxiously.
As Tim wrote in his GoFundMe campaign, “Words can only touch the surface of the pain Cole, my wife, our family and I feel physically and emotionally from this.”
In an email, a New York-Presbyterian spokesman said, “Due to patient privacy policies, we cannot comment.”
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