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Inset: Cole Groth (GoFundMe). Background: Tim and Gabrielle Groth (WCBS/YouTube).
Parents Tim Groth and Gabrielle Groth are currently “living a nightmare” at a New York City hospital as their newborn son, who was born with congenital heart disease, is fighting for his life in the ICU after nearly bleeding to death following a circumcision, the couple says.
“Could you imagine scheduling your son’s circumcision and possibly having him die?” writes Tim Groth in an online GoFundMe description, which describes his son’s health situation and what he says he has gone through so far.
The Groths say they welcomed their baby boy, Cole, on March 31 at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Manhattan. Cole had a stent placed due to a congenital heart disease, but was said to be “one of the healthiest babies on the floor,” according to his family’s GoFundMe.
He was circumcised on April 14, with the Groths claiming health complications came the next day.
“On Monday 4/14 at around 11pm Cole was Circumcised,” the online fundraiser says. “Between 2am-9.30am Cole nearly bled to death.”
“I walk in and he is extremely pale,” Gabrielle Groth told local CBS affiliate WCBS, describing the experience of seeing her baby in the neonatal intensive care unit.
“He is crying like I’ve never heard before,” she said. “It was not my healthy boy I saw just the day before.”
Tim Groth told WCBS that throughout the night for “10-plus hours” Cole bled and suffered multiple complications.
“The vital organs of his body lost blood and oxygen, and he suffered liver damage, kidney damage, brain damage,” Tim alleged. “How does that happen in a cardiac NICU?”
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According to the Groths, Cole was taken into emergency surgery and doctors were forced to remove a portion of his intestines that “had died” as a result of the health crisis. He at one point was sitting in the ICU “with countless tubes, medications, fluids, etc, helping us cling to the hope that he might live,” per the GoFundMe. He was said to still be in critical condition on Friday, WCBS reports.
“After cutting him open they found 5 segments of his intestines had died and turned black and that there was feces throughout his abdomen,” Tim Groth said in the GoFundMe description. “They proceeded to cut out the dead intestines and identified several other areas in the intestines that might die.”
Tim added, “Words can only touch the surface of the pain Cole, My wife, our family and I feel physically and emotionally from this.”
The Groths have said that Cole has been undergoing daily transfusions due to his health problems and he’s had at least four surgeries so far.
“Trying to understand how you could go from a circumcision in what seemed like a stable baby to crisis,” Tim Groth told WCBS.
He asks several times in the family’s GoFundMe description where the “accountability” has been. Hospital officials have declined to comment publicly about Cole and what the parents say happened.
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