The fetal surgery team that gave Aiden a second chance before birth

It’s a future his mother, Loren, once believed she would never see.

“I couldn’t imagine a world where I wasn’t extremely anxious about my children,” she says. “Now I just worry about normal parent stuff. I don’t worry about all the things I thought I’d worry about for the rest of my life.”

Aiden’s ordinary childhood began with one extraordinary decision: keeping an ultrasound appointment she almost cancelled.

A pregnancy informed by loss

Loren’s journey to Mount Sinai Hospital began before Aiden was born.

During an earlier pregnancy, doctors diagnosed her unborn baby with severe Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, a critical congenital heart defect where the left side of the heart is severely underdeveloped. After receiving the devastating news, she and her family made the heartbreaking decision to terminate the pregnancy.

“It was a terrible time,” she says. “But Sinai definitely helped facilitate the whole process and walked us through all of it.”

Loren still remembers the compassion of the nurses who cared for her. “They made something that was probably the darkest moment in my life as easy as it possibly could have been,” she says. “Their empathy and attention to care were next level.”

A year later, when Loren became pregnant again, every reassuring test result felt like another step toward healing. Her care team left nothing to chance. She underwent genetic testing, amniocentesis, early and detailed anatomy scans and fetal cardiac assessments. Everything looked normal.

Then came one final appointment: a specialized placental ultrasound.

The exam had been booked only because the placenta from her previous pregnancy had been unusually small. By then, Loren was finally beginning to feel optimistic. "I remember saying, ‘We’ve done every single test. I’m starting to feel okay. Should we just cancel this?’”

Instead, her obstetrician encouraged her to keep the appointment.

"Thank God we did," Loren says.

The scan that changed everything

Just two weeks after a normal ultrasound, the placental imaging revealed that rare cysts had rapidly developed in Aiden’s chest. They had grown so large that they were pushing his heart to the opposite side of his chest, threatening its ability to function.

Without the scan, Loren says, no one would have known. “We would never have caught that if they hadn’t booked that ultrasound and convinced me to go.”

That single imaging appointment transformed what appeared to be a healthy pregnancy into a race against time — allowing Sinai Health's fetal medicine team to intervene before irreversible damage occurred.

Loren immediately recognized the familiar sequence of events. “When they called in the radiologist, I knew something was wrong. My heart just dropped to my toes.”

Convinced she was about to lose another baby, Loren prepared herself for the worst.

Instead, she met Dr. Greg Ryan and the team at Sinai Health’s Ontario Fetal Centre.

Within days, Dr. Ryan performed a rare fetal intervention while Loren remained awake under light sedation. Guided by ultrasound imaging, he inserted a tiny shunt into Aiden’s chest to drain the fluid compressing his lungs and heart.

As Loren watched on the ultrasound monitor, the cysts began to shrink almost immediately. “He showed us the cysts just deflate,” she says. “That was the first time I breathed a sigh of relief.”

Loren was told that without the surgery, Aiden would have developed fetal hydrops, which happens when fluid accumulates in compartments of the body, leading to severe swelling. About half of all cases are newborn fatalities.

Over the following weeks, Loren returned regularly for imaging to monitor the shunt and Aiden’s condition. When the shunt dislodged, Dr. Ryan repeated the procedure, buying precious time until Aiden could be safely delivered at 37 weeks.

“I went home and did a deep dive into the research,” Loren recalls. “Everything I found pointed to just a handful of places in the world with this level of expertise, and Mount Sinai was one of them. I remember saying to my husband, ‘How lucky are we that this care is right here in our city?’”

Knowing she didn't have to leave home to access world-leading fetal care brought enormous comfort during an unimaginably stressful time. “I would have gone anywhere for my baby,’ she says. “Instead, I felt like I was in the best hands, at the best place possible. We were incredibly fortunate that this expertise was here for us.”

From life-saving care to life lived fully

After his birth, Aiden underwent surgery at The Hospital for Sick Children to remove a portion of his lung which was affected by the cysts. His recovery wasn’t easy. He spent a month in the neonatal intensive care unit and battled complications, including infections after surgery.

Then, months later, came the words Loren never expected to hear.

Doctors reviewed his imaging and told her his lungs had expanded and adapted so well that she could treat him like a normal, healthy child. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says.

Today, Loren’s fears have been replaced with gratitude.

Aiden excels at sports and towers over many of his classmates. Apart from a few small scars, there is little evidence of the battle he fought before he was even born. “It saved his life and his quality of life,” says Loren.

This year, Aiden finally learned the story of how close he came to never having the chance to lace up his skates.

For a Grade-4 school assignment called Project Give Back, students were asked to research a charity that had personal meaning. Loren and her husband decided it was time to tell him the truth. “He was very teary-eyed," she says. "He talked about Dr. Ryan like he was a superhero.”

Without prompting, Aiden sat down and wrote a letter to the physician who had operated on him before he was born. “It was the sweetest letter, saying thank you so much for saving my life,” says Loren. “I turned around so he wouldn’t see me crying. It was very meaningful.”

For Loren, that letter represents something far bigger than gratitude; it’s proof that one remarkable intervention and one extraordinary team can transform a life.

“We're just so lucky,” she says. “It saved his life — and it gave him the chance to live it.”

Your support helps make life-saving breakthroughs possible

Behind every healthy child like Aiden is a team of experts equipped with the technology, imaging and specialized training to act when every moment counts. Philanthropic support helps Sinai Health advance maternal-fetal care, invest in leading-edge medical imaging and equip clinicians with the tools they need to diagnose earlier, intervene sooner and improve outcomes for families across Canada. Donate today.