Bringing back Baby Jesse
Family insists oxygen therapy is helping boy who nearly drowned — but OHIP doesn’t cover treatment
Kristin Arrigo lays her baby between her outstretched legs, his head wobbling back and forth as she settles on the bed. The bed will carry her and 14-month-old Jesse into a clear glass tube for his 45th treatment in a hyperbaric chamber.
The treatments expose Jesse to pure oxygen in a pressurized environment for an hour at a time. They’re designed to counteract the effects of a tragic injury that happened 4 1⁄2 months ago when Jesse fell into a pond in his grandparents’ Mississauga backyard.
Doctors said he wouldn’t wake up from a coma — then he did. They said he’d never swallow again — now he can. “Every day he does something new that he couldn’t do before,” says Kristin. “He’s just finding his voice the past couple of weeks.”
Jesse wasn’t expected to survive after the near-drowning, which happened the afternoon of May17. Born to a mother who was told she’d never have children after surviving cervical cancer, Jesse continues to beat the odds.
His family credits hyperbaric oxygen therapy with his progress, but others are not so sure. Jesse’s specific affliction — ischemic hypoxia — isn’t recognized officially as something treatable with the therapy and it is not covered by OHIP.
The Ontario government covers hy- perbaric oxygen therapy for 13 conditions. It’s commonly used to treat carbon monoxide poisoning, wounds that won’t heal and decompression sickness.
Usage of private facilities outside the13 approved conditions is allowed, but consumers are warned to be wary. Ontario HBOT, a private centre where Jesse gets his treatments, says “off-label” uses of the therapy can be used to treat everything from cerebral palsy to strokes — a claim that Health Canada cautioned against.