Trip to Zoo Atlanta leads to lifesaving discovery for newborn and his father

ATLANTA - It was supposed to be a one-day road trip to Zoo Atlanta.  

The morning of June 21, 2014, Jenny and Michael Woodham, who were celebrating their 6th wedding anniversary, made the 90-minute drive from their home in Smith's Station, Alabama, to Grant Park in Atlanta with their 6-week-old son Raylan.

"The car ride was interesting, because we had to stop halfway because he was fussy, but we were still determined to go up there," Michael remembers.

When they arrived at Zoo Atlanta, Jenny says Raylan had calmed down and was sleeping.

But, as they began to walk through the zoo, things changed.

"We were actually in the reptile exhibit when all of this happened," she says.  "He just started screaming and crying."

Jenny, a nurse anesthetist, says Raylan's cries were like nothing she had ever heard before or has ever heard since.

They sounded more like grunts than cries.

Raylan, she says, felt hot to the touch, then suddenly cold, and his coloring appeared to be changing. 

He turned pale, and then to a sort of bluish color,

"We knew something was going very wrong at that moment," Michael Woodham says.

Raylan's tiny heart had gone into shock.

The Woodhams raced to the nearest hospital, Atlanta Medical Center.

From there Raylan was rushed by ambulance to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston, where the Woodhams found themselves in a triage area.

Raylan was on a gurney, surrounded by about 20 emergency staffers, Jenny Woodham remembers.

"Everbody had a role," she says.  "Everybody did what they were supposed to do.  They'd get out of the way and let the next person do what they were supposed to do. I knew that he was in the best hands."

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Raylan Woodham was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect known as coarctation of the aorta, a narrowing of  the large blood vessel that feeds blood away from the heart.

After his firsdt open-heart surgery, doctors found more heart defects, diagnosing him with Shone's disease, which affects blood flow into and out of the left side of his heart.  

That meant Raylan needed another surgery, this time to replace his failing mitral valve.

The Woodhams, who had planned on being in Atlanta for the day, would end up at Children's Healthcare for two months.

But that second surgery seemed to be a turning point for Raylan, Jenny Woodham says. 

"He was able to get off the ventilator," his mother says.  "He was able to come out of the ICU and start working on feeding normally again."

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Back home in Alabama, as Raylan recovered and grew, doctors urged his parents to also get screened for heart defects.

That is when Michael Woodham learned he, too, had a heart valve problem, his with his bicuspid valve, that had been causing his blood pressure to silently rise.

"We realized all the years Michael has been told he has "white coat syndrome," when he would go into the doctors' office, they thought his blood pressure was high because he was a young man, and he was scared of the doctor," Jenny Woodham says. "But now we know he was hypertensive, had high blood pressure all of those years, and that was from his heart defect."

Last year, Michael and Raylan both underwent heart surgeries, Michael at a Birmingham hospital and Raylan at Children's Healthcare. 

Raylan received new mitral valve to replace the one he was given when was a baby.

Julie Washington, a cardiac nurse at Sibley Heart Center says Raylan's diagnosis helped his father get help for an issue that might have otherwise been missed.

"A lot of these heart defects are congenital," Washington says.  "If Raylan hadn't been diagnosed, I don't know how Michael's  story would have gone, or how he would have been diagnosed."

Raylan is now 7 and thriving.  

"Yesterday, he tested for his blue belt in karate," his father says.

The Woodhams says they are grateful for the road trip that didn't go the way anyone planned.

It landed Raylan exactly where he needed to be, Jenny Woodham believes.

"Looking back on it, if we weren't at the Zoo on that day, we wouldn't have a baby," his mother says.