“I thought he was gone” Jimmy Giggle opens up on his baby’s medical emergency
Jimmy Giggle and wife Tori suffered through a terrible experience recently after their little boy Mack endured a near-fatal medical emergency.
Tongue-tie surgery gone wrong
Jimmy and Tori are parents to three-month-old twins, Vinny and Mack, as well as a three-year-old son named Lenny.
Back in April one of the twins was unexpectedly hospitalised after a tongue tie correction went terribly wrong. A major blood vessel was cut during what should have been a routine procedure and Mack was rushed off to hospital where medics performed CPR, carried out a blood transfusion and put the baby on a ventilator.
Over the weekend Stellar published an extensive interview with Tori and Jimmy. The couple explained how this horrible incident played out, revealing they thought their baby might die.
Jimmy said he noticed that he’d had several missed calls from Tori, and when he phoned her back she told him about the accident, and that Mack had gone from mild to critical condition.
The pair’s baby was taken by ambulance to Gosford Hospital, where more than 20 doctors and nurses took the baby straight to the emergency theatre.
“This is something they rarely see — that age and that amount of blood loss,” Jimmy told Stellar. “His heart rate had dipped below a threshold so they actually started administering CPR to him.”
It all happened very quickly
Jimmy says the surgeon thankfully managed to stitch Mack’s wound and he was stabilised, but the little guy still had to undergo a blood transfusion.
It was initially thought they’d fly Mack to Sydney Children’s Hospital, but staff determined they did not have time and had to act quickly to save the baby’s life. Thankfully they did just that and Mack was on the mend within a few days, but the little boy still won’t take a dummy and will need to undergo speech therapy.
The incident took a toll on everyone, a teary Jimmy said.
“When we debriefed weeks later, we both just burst into tears and said, ‘I thought he was gone.’”
Three different opinions
The family has faced some unfair criticism for deciding to carry out the procedure on their baby, but Tori says they researched it carefully and had hoped it would make life easier for Mack.
“I had three different professional opinions and they said his feeding will be so much better if we get it done, so we did it,” Tori told Stellar.
“A tongue-tie procedure is meant to be no big deal whatsoever. It might bleed the tiniest bit, then you feed them and that’s really it. But in our case, it was just done wrong.”
Jimmy says that Mack’s treatment is now being scrutinised by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission.
“There were some errors of judgement and that’s for [them] to figure out … We know accidents happen, everyone’s human. It was unfortunate it was Mack. But the events that happened after were not right.”
