Couple seeks help for daughter after 2 open-heart surgeries
A San Antonio couple is asking for prayers after their 2year-old daughter was diagnosed with a cold but ended up on the operating table for two emergency open-heart surgeries.
Rosie Montez explained the nightmare situation in a Gofundme she set up for her nephew, Hector Calvillo, and his fiancee, Sienna Pesina. She said Calvillo brought his young daughter, Adelina, to an emergency clinic Dec. 11 and was told that her fever and cough were symptoms of a common cold.
A few days later, when her condition didn’t improve, Adelina was brought to University Health Hospital and admitted after testing positive for respiratory syncytial virus, commonly known as RSV.
RSV is a highly contagious virus that affects the nose, throat and lungs. For most people, it presents like a cold, causing a cough, a runny nose and sometimes a fever, but it can cause severe infection in young children.
In Adelina’s case, it caused her to develop pneumonia and suffer serious damage to her lungs, Montez said.
Calvillo said on Facebook that his daughter was placed on ECMO, an advanced form of life support used for patients with heart and lung failure, on Christmas Eve. He said the machine was helping Adelina’s lungs heal but that a few days later, doctors identified bleeding around her heart.
“Everything was looking better,” Calvillo wrote. “But the same machine helping her also made holes in her heart so she had to have emergency open heart surgery to find the source of the bleeding.”
He said the doctors “did an amazing job” and were able to close the punctures but discovered more blood around her heart last week. On Jan. 3, she underwent a second surgery, but this time, Calvillo wrote, they could not locate the source of the bleeding.
At the time of his Facebook post Jan. 4, Adelina was in the intensive care unit, and her chest remained open as a precaution. Montez said Thursday that her chest has been closed and that she is in “stable but critical” condition. She received another surgery this week to get a tracheostomy tube to help her lungs open.
“She is still heavily sedated and she has two chest tubes instead of four, they just removed two of the chest tubes today,” Pesina wrote in a statement provided by Montez. “They also restarted her blood thinners so that will help with her blood clots in her arm and legs.”
Montez set up the Gofundme last week to help defray medical costs for the family. She said Calvillo is an AC technician and Pesina is a nurse at the hospital where Adelina is currently being treated, but neither parent has been working so they can be with their daughter and care for her sister, Alessia, 4. The couple is expecting their third daughter in March, Montez said.
“They’ve been together since high school … they are good parents,” Montez said through tears. “Everyone is seeing (Adelina) sick and not at her best, but when she is, she is such a sweet little girl … feisty, but sweet.”
The family’s story reached local author and journalist Shea Serrano, who posted the Gofundme on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter, to his more than 428,000 followers.
“If you want an easy way to do a good thing today then here you go,” wrote Serrano, who is known for his work with a sports website, the Ringer.
When Serrano first posted the fundraiser, it had $1,928 worth of donations. As of Thursday, it had raised $13,550 of its $15,000 goal.
Montez said Adelina turned 2 in October. The weekend before she got sick, Adelina and her sister went to Montez’s house to decorate Christmas cookies. Montez said everyone couldn’t stop laughing because, every five minutes, Adelina would take a break from playing to say, “Daddy, I love you.”
“She does this constantly, all the time, with her parents, her sister, her grandma, whoever,” Montez said. “Her favorite words to say are, ‘I love you.’ ”