The Rosales Family Miracle

As Belinda’s 6-month-old son, Isaiah Quintero, battles for life in the neonatal ICU, the Ronald McDonald House Corpus Christi, have become family to the Brownsville mom and her three other children who have been living together for months, more than 150 miles away from home. Soon after birth, Isaiah developed a condition that afflicts premature babies called necrotizing enterocolitis, which causes the baby’s intestines to develop poor blood flow leading to infections that in severe cases require surgeries to remove part of the bowel. At a week old, Isaiah was flown by helicopter from a Brownsville hospital to Driscoll Children’s Hospital for treatment, and he has remained there since, never spending a day outside of the hospital. After Isaiah was hospitalized, Belinda, who doesn’t have insurance, sold nearly everything she owned to make enough money to move to Corpus Christi. The single mother and her three children, ages 6 to 15, came to us at the Ronald McDonald House in June of last year. Belinda says, we have given her the priceless gift of friendship, a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on as Isaiah, clinging to life, undergoes surgery after surgery to repair holes in his intestines.

“He’s been through so much, had so many surgeries so many times,” Said Belinda “We didn’t know if he was going to make it or not. That brought us really close to each other.” Born in June more than three months premature, Isaiah weighed 1 pound, 10 ounces and fit into the palm of his mother’s hand. Belinda spends much of her day at Isaiah’s bedside, kissing his fingers, stroking his soft, black tufts of hair and adjusting the blanket around him. Isaiah’s oldest sister, Noemi de la Torre, who misses her friends in Brownsville, has enrolled at Ray High School. Instead of marking her 15th birthday surrounded by family and friends for a quinceañera, the Ronald McDonald House had a cookout for her.

There were no gifts at the party, Noemi asked for only one: that Isaiah gets better.

“My baby brother means a lot to me and my family,” she wrote in a letter for an English class assignment. “We don’t want to lose him. We want him to come home and be with us, so that we can play with him and be with him and make him feel special ... I want him to be like before, moving around, opening his eyes, and especially not feeling pain. We want to be able to hold him and kiss him like before. I really want him to recover through all this and make it.” Isaiah’s prognosis was poor from the start unable to digest food the doctors believed that he would be sent home to die of starvation. He reacted poorly to surgeries, bleeding and swelling with fluid. At one point, Isaiah’s condition declined so much, his mother agreed to take him off life support and leave his life in God’s hands.

That night, the nurse with whom Rosales has grown closest, Lea Trevino, stayed after work with Rosales and her children at the hospital. “We all sat around and cried,” Trevino said. “The next morning, I came early and we did the same thing. And then, he started doing better.” As Isaiah improved, Rosales put him back on life support. He has improved steadily since, pushing past the setbacks and near daily surgeries to get a little better each day. “It’s been like World War III,” Belinda said. “We’ve fought every day to keep him.” Though Isaiah’s outlook is still grim, he is better now than he ever has been. When Dr. Emran Mohammad opened Isaiah’s tummy again, for the fourth time, he discovered a pleasant surprise: There were no holes in Isaiah’s intestines. The news was a miracle, Rosales said. So those rare times she can cradle the infant, free of his ventilator, feeding tube and IVs. She’s grateful to everyone at Driscoll and the Ronald McDonald House who have done all they can to save her baby boy.

“It truly is a miracle place,” she said.