Two-year-old Adaś, whose doctors managed to recover from the state of deep hypothermia, was discharged on Thursday from the University Children’s Hospital in Kraków-Prokocim, where he was treated for almost 2,5 months. The boy will still need rehabilitation.
The child was admitted to the hospital in Kraków on November 30, last year, after he sneaked out of his home in Racławice near Krzeszowice at night. After initiating the search, he found the boy in only his pajamas, on the river bank, a few hundred meters from the buildings, a policeman. After being brought to the hospital, it turned out that the boy was chilled to 12,7 degrees C. According to specialists, saving a person after such a cooling down of the body is almost a miracle.
After being transported to the Krakow hospital, Adaś was hooked up to a device that allows the so-called extracorporeal blood oxygenation. After he awoke from his coma three days later, he breathed for a while with the help of a respirator. The boy spent almost 2,5 months in the hospital: first 23 days in the intensive care unit, then 51 days in the neuro-rehabilitation unit.
As reported by the representatives of the hospital, the boy walks on his own, thanks to the care of specialists and painstaking exercises, his manual dexterity has also improved. He will still need rehabilitation after he returns home.
We dreamed that this child would leave the hospital in the form in which it comes out. At the moment he is in perfect intellectual contact with the world, it is a great joy, because this child is fully coming back to life – said prof. Janusz Skalski, head of Children’s Cardiac Surgery at the Children’s University Hospital.
“The child plays, rides, runs, jumps up, is even unruly. It behaves exactly as it should behave “- said prof. Skalski.
During the press conference, Adaś appeared in the room with his parents. He walked independently, posed for photojournalists, sat at a table and played with toys prepared on it. It is a great happiness for us to be able to return home with our son, who is almost fully functional, said the boy’s mother.
As emphasized by prof. Skalski, the return to full health of a little patient is “a great joy for all of us and Polish medicine”. He noted that the boy was saved thanks to the excellent preparation of all the services involved in the operation: from a policeman who found a cooled child and started providing first aid, through an ambulance service, to doctors and nurses in the hospital.
According to prof. Skalski in Małopolska and Kraków, there is a model system for the treatment of hypothermic patients, developed by a team from the Specialist Hospital. John Paul II, which should be admitted to all centers in Poland. “Our country is prepared to save such patients,” he assessed.
Adam’s return to full fitness – said prof. Skalski – this is due to the multi-day work of the rehabilitation team under the supervision of Dr. Anna Świerczyńska. As the doctor recalled, when the little patient was transported to the neuro-rehabilitation ward, he could only sit down for a short time.
“After a dozen or so days, we have reached the first + milestone + – the first walk of a few steps. He is a small child, it took great persuasion to convince him to perform these tedious and monotonous exercises ”- she assessed. According to her, the boy is currently walking independently, but still requires rehabilitation and exercise.
Dr. Maciej Kowalczyk, director of the University Children’s Hospital, estimated that the team of the facility achieved the treatment effect he dreamed of, and that Adaś became the most famous Polish patient in the world, because his fate was followed by millions of people around the world.
The boy’s parents, Paulina and Mateusz, also participated in the conference. They thanked everyone who contributed to saving their son: doctors, nurses and paramedics, policemen and firefighters. “It is a great happiness for us, looking at him, we are really very happy that we are coming home” – said the boy’s mother. (PAP)