A Heart For Liam

When doctors discovered the six-year-old had a rare genetic abnormality, he and his mother began the long, uncertain wait for a transplant

- Harold Gagné

THE HEART MONITOR alarm jolts Kim Morris from her sleep. It’s the middle of the night on June 11, 2017.Morris, 38, had nodded off on the sofa in a room in the intensive care unit of the Montreal Children’s Hospital. Her six-year-old son, Liam Dubois, is in obvious distress. He has thrown up and is ashen-faced and wildeyed. As Liam faints, Morris sprints into the hallway and yells for help.

“His blood pressure is in free fall,” says nurse Joëlle Lévesque, who has rushed into the room with two of her colleagues and a doctor.

The physician immediately orders that the amiodarone, administered for the past six hours to control Liam’s arrhythmia, be stopped—the patient is clearly reacting badly to the intravenous medication. In the meantime, Lévesque grabs a syringe filled with albumin to quickly replenish Liam’s fluids and injects it into the boy’s catheter. Everyone is relieved when he regains consciousness a few seconds later. He’ll pull through. This time.

A WEEK EARLIER, Liam is trying to lead his regular life in Montreal’s east end. A bundle of kinetic energy, he’s usually unstoppable: he loves swimming, boxing, judo, running, soccer. So when he complains of stomach pain and begins vomiting, Morris takes him to a medical clinic—not once but twice. In both instances, the doctors send the pair home with a diagnosis of gastroenteritis. Then, on June 9, after Liam throws up in school, Morris decides to take him to the emergency room.

She isn’t too concerned, though she hopes he will be kept for observation and given fluids for dehydration. But once at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, her world is turned upside down. During triage, Liam turns blue and a nurse alerts an emergency doctor, who orders an ultrasound and a consult with a cardiologist. Liam spends three hours in the ER until his test results come in.