Levi Finds His Voice

The surgery itself was a success; the trouble began during recovery. He had a breathing tube during that recovery, and when the tube was removed, he went into respiratory failure, so the tube had to go back in. “But his throat was swollen from the surgery,” Kristen says, “so when the doctor put in the breathing tube, she damaged everything, all the way down, including his airway and his vocal cords.”

No one had any way of knowing that at the time. In fact, the problem only became apparent when the second tube was removed. “We noticed right off the bat that something was wrong with him,” Kristen says. “Every time he drew in breath, he squeaked like a squeaky toy, and he had no voice. He couldn’t cry, he couldn’t do anything.”

Levi was in the adult hospital for several more weeks, without any answer to explain this problem and with Levi’s condition progressively getting worse. Finally, Kristen and her husband decided to transfer him to a children’s hospital in Massachusetts, and by the time he arrived, he was in critical condition. “They brought him into the OR,” Kristen says, “where a huge team of surgeons did a scope of his airway. That’s when they found that with that last intubation of the breathing tube, Levi had developed massive amounts of scar tissue in his airway. They said he was breathing through a space the size of the tip of a pen.”

His vocal cords were so damaged that they had scarred up and fused together. They were paralyzed. So at three months, Levi had a tracheostomy (in which a tube is inserted through an incision in the throat below the vocal cords to allow air to get to the lungs) and a feeding tube inserted in his belly. Finally, Levi could breathe easy and go home for the first time.

But he needed ongoing care and therapy, so his parents had to make a choice about where to take him, which was not easy, given their history with hospitals. “We had heard a lot of good things about Connecticut Children’s,” Kristen says, “so that’s where we decided to continue Levi’s care.”

The prevailing medical opinion was that Levi would never speak, because of the amount of damage to his vocal cords. But Nicole Murray, MD, the head of the Center for Airway, Voice, and Swallowing Disorders, said, “I’m going to do everything I can to give your child a voice.” She performed multiple procedures in which she used a laser to cut away the scar tissue around his vocal cords and then put a stent in his airway to let the tissue heal.

All that innovation, expertise, and dedication paid off. “When he was almost a year old,” Kristen says, “he started making little “ooos” and “aaahhs,” and from there he just broke down every barrier that was set in front of him. He had his trach removed in July 2020 and his feeding tube removed in November. He’s now breathing fine, and he eats and drinks me out of house and home. I’m obviously biased, but he really is a little miracle kid. There were times when I didn’t think I was going to make it. But he just kept pushing and kept smiling. It’s as though he was saying, ‘Oh, they’re telling me I can’t do this thing? Well, watch me. I’ll do this thing plus this thing!’”

Levi will still be coming to Connecticut Children’s for follow-up visits for the next couple of years, to be sure there are no residual effects from all the anesthesia he’s been exposed to. He still struggles with his speech, but he is talking and singing—Luke Combs songs, of course. And that’s music to everyone’s ears.