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American Heart Month, which takes place every February, has taken on greater meaning for Hallmark Channel star Nikki DeLoach ever since her second child was born with life-threatening congenital heart defects (CHDs) in 2017.
February is also Congenital Heart Defects Awareness Month, and while the actress, writer, and director has often shared how grateful she is for the doctors and interventions that have saved her son’s life multiple times, she’s using the occasion to now share more about their journey.
When DeLoach was five months pregnant with Bennett, her second son with husband Ryan Goodell, they learned he had multiple CHDs and were not sure he would survive. She told People in November 2017 that tests showed he had “a ventricular septal defect (or VSD), which is a small hole in his heart, his aorta was narrow, his coronary artery would have to be moved, and he had a transposition of his great arteries, which meant the two arteries that go into his heart were going into the wrong chambers.”
Bennett was born on September 20, 2017, and five days later, DeLoach told People, he underwent open-heart surgery at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA). She said Bennett’s cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Vaughn Starnes, “did the impossible by successfully completing procedures that most kids do not survive.” She is so grateful for the hospital’s help that she’s become president of the foundation’s board of trustees, raising $5.5 million for CHLA at an October 2022 fundraiser, per the Hollywood Reporter.
Bennett, who’s now five, has had three heart surgeries in his short life, according to Los Angeles Confidential. Though he is thriving, his condition is something his parents continue to be acutely aware of and that is closely monitored by doctors. Raising a child with CHDs has been an eye-opening and challenging journey, but DeLoach has opened up in a new Instagram post about how she’s embracing what she’s learned and gained from the experience while also revealing that Bennett will require further surgical intervention.
Nikki DeLoach Says She is Now ‘Heart Obsessed’
On February 21, 2023, DeLoach shared an Instagram post with several slides of insights, titling her writings “Thoughts on the Heart From a Heart Mom During Heart Month.” She captioned the post with a message urging her followers to take care of their hearts and get them checked regularly.
“Please make sure you are eating well and treating your heart with love, which includes taking care of your mental health,” she wrote. “Emotional trauma increases the risk of heart attack and heart death.”
Within the slides she created, DeLoach shared, “I took my own heart health for granted until I found out that my son would be born with multiple congenital heart defects.”
Now, she wrote, “I am heart obsessed.”
She continued, “Did you know everyone in the world has a unique heartbeat? The heartbeat, like our fingerprints or our dreams, identifies each of us as a unique being.”
DeLoach also shared a past photo of her holding her distraught son in the hospital and statistics about heart health, including the fact that heart disease is the leading cause of death among adults in the U.S. and that CHDs are the leading cause of infant death due to birth defects in the U.S.
“Surgery is often not a cure for CHDs,” she wrote. “Many individuals with CHDs require additional operation(s) and/or medications as adults.”
When one of her fans thanked her for her honest post and shared her daughter, who’s now 17, had undergone multiple harrowing surgeries for CHDs — including having her pulmonary valve replaced via a catheter through her groin area — DeLoach replied with compassion and also revealed her son will require a similar procedure in the future.
She wrote, “I’ve been praying for that because Benny will need a new piece of gortex in his pulmonary and I really hope they can do it via cath. We are not alone and I’m so grateful for that. It’s an honor to walk alongside you.”
DeLoach’s post inspired at least one of her followers to immediately schedule a heart check. The man, who identified himself as a senior citizen, wrote, “l appreciate your heart felt message here, lm grateful for the prompt to do better with my own Heart health”
“Thank you for sharing that,” DeLoach responded. “I’m so glad it spoke to you. I’ve had my whole family check their hearts. It’s such a great way to take care of yourself and love you.”
The man was so delighted that he’d received a response from the star, he wrote that she’d made his day and that he’d just scheduled a” full Heart scan and health check.”
Nikki DeLoach Collects Hearts as a Symbol of Her Family’s Journey
In a November 2022 interview with The Retaility, DeLoach revealed the agony of waiting during her son’s first life-saving surgery when he was just days old.
“When Bennett was in the (operating) room and we were waiting, I felt like my heart was being cut into,” she said, recalling that surgeons realized the newborn’s condition was even worse than expected. “It was the worst-case scenario and he only had one coronary artery, not two coronary arteries, and the coronary artery was in the wrong place. That’s the thing where they almost lost him on the table during the surgery—it was moving that coronary artery.”
However, her experiences with Bennett have come with a silver lining, she said, since she learned to value and prioritize what really matters in life, in a way that she still hadn’t fully grasped after the birth of her first son, William, who’s now 9.
“Bennett turned me into the best version of myself,” she said. “I had such warped priorities in so many ways before he came into my life. Even after having had my first kid, I still had those same warped priorities. I got myself on a red carpet two weeks after giving birth (with William). Bennett blew all of that out of the water.”
DeLoach now collects hearts to remind her of the journey they’ve been on and the miracles in her midst. Photos in the Retaility article, taken in DeLoach’s home, showed a huge heart painting in one room, a heart-shaped wreath on her front door, and heart mobiles hanging on her back patio.
“They were either given to me or collected in different places. Everywhere I go, I try to buy a heart,” she said.
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