Montreal doctors give baby girl chance at a healthy life in Quebec medical first

Sia Terhzaz Senica is now living a healthy life and her parents couldn’t be happier.

The one-year-old was born 15 weeks prematurely on March 18, 2021.

The infant was struggling with serious medical complications and had to be resuscitated and put on a ventilator with a breathing tube.

Sia had a blocked airway due to a collapsed trachea and there was blood on her lungs.

At one point, her mother, Tanja Senica, feared for her daughter’s life.

“She almost died on me,” Senica told Global News.

Specialists at the Montreal Children’s Hospital were considering open heart surgery or Sia would have to live with a breathing tube for several years.

But after consulting a colleague at Columbia University, the specialists opted for a procedure called NIV-NAVA, where a computer attached to a breathing tube with electrodes on the end was inserted into Sia’s stomach. The electrodes detected every time Sia would take a breath and send a message to the computer to pump air into her lungs.

“That (is) what I think prevented the collapse of the trachea,” Dr. Guilherme Sant’Anna, a neonatologist at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, told Global News.

Sia remained on the NIV-NAVA system for five weeks until she was able to breathe on her own.

It’s the first time this medical procedure has been performed in Quebec and Sant’Anna says it worked better than anticipated.

“In a way, we were going based on principals but this had never been done before,” Sant’Anna said.

To complicate matters, Sia’s mother developed complications following the birth of her daughter and eventually required open-heart surgery.

“Going into heart surgery, with 10 per cent chance of not making it, that’s one thing. The other thing is what if I make it, and God forbid, something happens to her (Sia) and I wake up without her,” Senica said.

The mother’s surgery was a success and now more than one year after Sia’s birth, everyone is healthy and the family of three is enjoying this new chapter in their life.

“Tremendous amount of gratitude about the happy ending,” Senica said.