VALDOSTA —
VALDOSTA — From a baby who once battled a “water head” and two heart surgeries, Sarah Grace Bonner has emerged as a thriving, active 11 year old who enjoys riding the waves of Long Pond on her wakeboard.
The sixth-grader at Hahira Middle “loves the outdoors, going to the beach and making big sand castles and boogie boarding.”
“I love to go fishing and hunting with Daddy,” said Sarah Grace, who received a .22 rifle for Christmas.
She and her daddy, Don Bonner, enjoy hunting for deer, usually in Brooks County.
But there was a time when her mother, Teresa, was carrying her that the doctors gave her parents the option of terminating the pregnancy.
In the 16th week of her pregnancy, Teresa’s local doctor noticed an excess amount of fluid on her baby’s brain, and she was referred to a perinatal specialist in Macon. Sarah Grace was diagnosed with mild hydrocephaly, which is malfunctioning ventricles in the brain which regulate the input and output of fluid. The condition is commonly know as “water-head baby.”
Physicians told the couple the baby was facing the possibility of several devastating medical conditions as a result, including spina bifida, mental retardation and the possibility their baby would have no brain function and be a vegetable.
“That’s when they gave the option to terminate,” Don recalled in an interview in 1999, three months after their baby was born on April 8 at South Georgia Medical Center.
Terminating the pregnancy was simply not an option for the parents.
“With my maternal instinct, I knew my daughter was going to be OK. I knew God was going to take care of her,” Teresa said in the earlier interview.
“We put all our trust and faith in God,” Don added. “At that point there was nothing the doctors could do.
“We prayed and prayed and prayed. We never asked why. We didn’t get mad at God. That wasn’t the question we asked. We had something to deal with, and we dealt with it through God.”
And the miracle they prayed for came true when Teresa went for an ultrasound during her 24th week: The doctors could find no fluid whatsoever.
But other challenges were yet to come. The day after Sarah Grace was born, an electrocardiogram revealed a serious heart defect. She was life-flighted to Shands Teaching Hospital at the University of Florida, where a pediatric cardiologist diagnosed the baby with a hypoplastic left ventricle (left ventricle too small for the blood to flow through), a bicuspid aortic stenosis (aorta and its orifice is abnormally narrow) and a narrowing of her aortic arch.
Two procedures would be successfully done, a balloon valveuloplasty to open up the aortic valve and a week later, open heart surgery to repair the narrow arch. Three weeks after her birth, Sarah Grace got to go home with her parents.
“Her doctors predicted she would have more heart surgeries by 5 years old, but she hasn’t had any major heart surgeries,” Teresa said in an interview Monday. “She has amazed even her doctors.”
Since Sarah Grace turned 2, she has been having check-ups at Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
“She’s had two heart catherizations: One was to close a valve not closed at birth,” Teresa said.
“She still has aortic stenosis and mitral valve stenosis, but they are mild to moderate and require no intervention as of now. She lives and plays like a normal little girl.”
And she has a sister, Hannah, 6, to play with, who is a first-grader at Hahira Elementary.
“We were not going to have another child because the doctors said there was a 50 percent possibility of another child born with a heart defect, but we talked and prayed about it,” said Teresa, an eighth grade teacher at Hahira Middle School. “Hannah had an ECHO (echocardiogram) when she was born, and it showed no heart defect.”
For parents of children with congenital heart defects, Teresa advises, “Don’t put limits on what your children can do. The best advice we got before leaving Shands was to treat her like a normal child — not like she is in a bubble.”
Each night, Sarah Grace thanks God for her healthy heart. She is considering a career as a heart physician in the future.
“I want to help children with heart defects,” she said.
With everything the parents have gone through with Sarah Grace, her daddy says he’s learned “not to sweat the small stuff.”
“At the end of the day, I’m thanking God my child is still with me.”
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Jonathan M. Chick | The Valdosta Daily Times Sara Bonner wakeboards on Long Pond.
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