Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter.
Mikhael Perez Cevilla’s aunt, Valerine Valdez (middle), shows the child a video on her phone and strokes Rosa Cevilla Bonilla’s head as he gets an echocardiogram at the Children’s Heart Institute in Fredericksburg on Friday.
Rosa Cevilla Bonilla looks at her son, Mikhael Perez Cevilla, as he crawls onto her lap at her sister-in-law’s home in Spotsylvania. Mikhael was born with a rare combination of heart defects.
Isaiah Valdez (left) plays with his cousin, Mikhael Perez Cevilla. The toddler recovered from open-heart surgery and is healthy.
Mikhael Perez Cevilla looks up at his mother, Rosa Cevilla Bonilla (left), while they wait to see the doctor at the Children’s Heart Institute in Fredericksburg on Friday, Feb. 25, 2022.
Rosa Cevilla Bonilla holds her son, Mikhael Perez Cevilla, as he receives an echocardiogram at the Children’s Heart Institute in Fredericksburg on Friday, Feb. 25, 2022.
Mikhael developed a purplish tinge soon after he was born due to his heart issues.
Mikhael Perez Cevilla was 2 months old when he had open heart surgery.
Doctors, and his own family, were amazed at how quickly Mikhael Perez Cevilla recovered from open heart surgery. This photo was taken less than a week after his chest was cut open.
Who could look at the photo and not feel for the baby with all the tubes, wires and sensors hooked up to his body?
There’s a thick white bandage down the middle of his chest and an oxygen tube in his nose, held in place by adhesive gauze. The tape is cut in the shape of hearts—one on each cheek— the only cheerful aspect of the picture.
Clearly, Mikhael Perez Cevilla has been through something serious.
But another image, taken less than a week later, shows Mikhael looking like any happy and healthy infant—except for the slice down his chest where he had open-heart surgery. It’s still held together by surgical glue.
“He’s been like that since he was born,” his aunt, Valerine Valdez, said about his pleasant nature. “He’s never been fussy.”
“The only time he cries is when he’s hungry or has a [dirty] diaper, that’s it,” said his mother, Rosa Cevilla Bonilla.
“He’s been a true blessing,” Valdez said. “We say it all the time, he’s our little miracle boy.”
She and Cevilla Bonilla are the primary caretakers of Mikhael, born 13 months ago with not one, but two, congenital heart defects. Surgery corrected the problems, allowing Mikhael to thrive and reach all his developmental milestones as any baby would.
He doesn’t even have to take medicine for the conditions that once threatened his life.
He’s done “fantastic,” said Dr. Keyur Mehta, a pediatric cardiologist who diagnosed Mikhael’s condition the day after his birth at Spotsylvania Regional Medical Center. “The family is extremely grateful for all the care that their son got, and I’m equally grateful for the family to see how everything has changed.”
Cevilla Bonilla and Valdez seem as close as sisters, but they’re not related by blood. They’re sisters-in law. Valdez’s brother is the father of Mikhael and his big sister, Elliana, who’s 5.
When the relationship between Valdez’s brother and Cevilla Bonilla ended, Valdez opted to stand by Cevilla Bonilla for the sake of the children. Not everyone understood that decision.
“People are like, blood is blood, and I’m like, nope, the children are the priority over irresponsible adults,” she said. “We gotta do right by the kids.”
As a result, Cevilla Bonilla spends much of her time with the Valdez family when she’s not at her mother’s house. The two homes are less than 7 minutes apart in Spotsylvania County.
Valdez was there for the birth of Elliana and has been a calming presence during the ordeal with Mikhael’s health.
“She’s like a second mother,” Cevilla Bonilla.
Of course, neither knew what was happening, shortly after Mikhael’s birth when hospital workers called the cardiologist, concerned about the “blue baby.”
Up to that point, the newborn had been doing fine, and there hadn’t been any problems during pregnancy. The mother and aunt noticed Mikhael “was a little bit purple, but not anything crazy,” Valdez said, and weren’t concerned because he passed all the screenings given after birth.
Mehta was seeing patients at the Children’s Heart Institute’s clinic in Manassas and dropped everything when he got the call about Mikhael. He felt he didn’t have “the luxury of time to wait.”
An echocardiogram, which gives an outline of the heart’s movements, showed that Mikhael had total anomalous pulmonary venous return or TAPVR. It affects the four pulmonary veins which typically connect to the left atrium, or upper chamber of the heart. Mikhael’s weren’t attached correctly, making it look like he had a “floating heart,” Valdez said.
With the condition, oxygen-rich blood that’s supposed to come from the lungs and go to the left atrium—then be pumped throughout the body—ends up in the right atrium instead. All that blood in one place causes the heart to work harder and results in the baby’s bluish-purple tinge because the body isn’t getting enough oxygen-rich blood.
Babies with TAPVR usually have a second defect, a hole between the left and right atrium that allows the mixed blood to get to the left atrium and be pumped to the rest of the body, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All babies are born with that hole but it usually closes up in a few days or weeks, Mehta said.
In Mikhael’s case, the secondary issue—known as atrial septal defect—was keeping the baby alive, even as the primary problem threatened to kill him. However, that situation wasn’t sustainable as the hole in Mikhael’s heart eventually got smaller.
Mehta discussed the case with surgeons at Children’s National Hospital in Washington and they planned to operate when the baby reached 6 months.
Surgeons prefer to wait until the baby has gotten a little older and stronger and the veins—initially as small as coffee stirrers—have gotten slightly bigger, Mehta said. But, the impact the condition is having on the infant weighs into the decision, as many can’t thrive because of their weakened state.
That was hardly the case with the baby first nicknamed “Spiky” because of his headful of black hair that seemingly had a mine of its own, no matter how his mother tried to manage it. His appetite was never affected, even in the hours after surgery. The reason he needed his procedure sooner—at 2 months—was because the hole in his heart was closing, and one side of his heart had grown larger than the other.
The mother and aunt have tried to put away the memories of that difficult time, when they had to arrange for a virtual baptism because there wasn’t time for a traditional service.
Children’s National allowed the aunt to be there with the mother, and she chronicled everything that was happening. Her phone is filled with photos of Mikhael, before and after surgery, as well as business cards of the doctors who treated him and drawings they did to illustrate the heart defects.
Everyone they dealt with was wonderful, Valdez said, and helped any way they could, but it was “still a bit traumatic” knowing the baby was about to have his chest cut open.
“Mama was struggling,” Valdez said.
When a nurse came to take the baby into surgery, Cevilla Bonilla’s worst fears were realized.
“I felt like I almost died at that moment,” the mother said.
Congenital heart defects are rare, accounting for only about 1 percent of total births, Mehta said. The issue Mikhael had is found in less than 2 percent of babies born with heart-related defects.
Then, the mixed type of TAPVR, in which the pulmonary veins drained into several different areas, is even more unusual.
“It would probably be 1 in 100,000 or something like that,” Mehta said. “You can do the math. It is quite, quite rare.”
But it seemed like the threat was behind Mikhael as soon as he came out of surgery. His aunt and mother had been told that babies often remain sedated for up to 12 hours after a procedure, then have to wait a few more hours to eat. Mikhael was awake, smiling and enjoying a bottle of formula about four hours later.
“They weren’t ready for that,” Valdez said. “They even brought students over to his room because the doctor was like, ‘we never have this.’ He ate, he peed, he pooped, he was awake, he was not crying. He was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.”
His hospitalization followed the same path. Some babies have to stay three weeks or longer, but Mikhael was able to come home after five days. Doctors told the family not to lift him by the arms when they picked him up, but to scoop him up under his back to protect his chest.
That was the only precaution. Otherwise, the family was to treat him like any other baby.
One look at the 13-month at play shows he’s anything but delicate.
He recently started walking and is fond of grabbing or playfully smacking at anything within reach—his mother’s phone, a reporter’s notebook, a photographer’s camera. There are several small and large dogs in the Valdez house, from a Chihuahua to a German shepherd, and Mikhael romps with them on the dog bed or toddles after them to his favorite place, Valerine Valdez’s office. She and her husband, Kelvin, are retired Marines who work remotely for the Department of Homeland Security.
During Zoom meetings, Mikhael’s happy face often pops up on the screen.
“Everybody who knows Mikhael loves Mikhael,” Kelvin Valdez said. “Everybody who has carried him, touched him, even people who never seen him in person but have seen him during my Bible study group, he’ll come up in the camera every now and then, he’s just a blessing. Every child is, but to see what he has gone through, you would never think.”
His voice trailed off for a moment, then he added that Mikhael has the typical childhood ailments—toothache, ear infection, fever. He gets a dose of medicine and is good to go.
“He’s running around, back to being a terror,” the uncle said.
Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter.
I've been lucky enough to be a newspaper reporter for more than 40 years, covering everything from human-interest stories to medical news, farming to fracking, personal columns to county government.
Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
The Virginia Board of Education on Wednesday deferred a decision on whether to grant a superintendent’s license to Mark Taylor, a former Spots…
Two popular Fredericksburg-area water spots have been added to the state’s impaired waterways list.
The Stafford County School Board will hold a special meeting Aug. 23 to hear a report on what went wrong during the planning and execution of …
U.S. Postal Service spokesman says Orange County train depot's historical exhibit is “unacceptable,” so agency closed Montpelier Station post office.
A former Stafford County deputy who struck and killed a pedestrian last summer while on duty pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor Monday.
A trial for one of three young people charged in a slaying and dismemberment last year in Spotsylvania County has been moved to March 2023.
King George native and NFL champ partners with county, alumni group to focus on restoring aging Ralph Bunche High School.
Those who deal with things that slither say more copperheads, especially, may be coming into contact with people and pets because of lost habitat.
Stafford deputies came up empty handed Friday during a manhunt for an assault suspect that temporarily led to a partial lockdown at Stafford H…
The driver who was hurt in a crash last year that killed two of his passengers and injured two others pleaded guilty to multiple offenses Frid…
Mikhael Perez Cevilla’s aunt, Valerine Valdez (middle), shows the child a video on her phone and strokes Rosa Cevilla Bonilla’s head as he gets an echocardiogram at the Children’s Heart Institute in Fredericksburg on Friday.
Rosa Cevilla Bonilla looks at her son, Mikhael Perez Cevilla, as he crawls onto her lap at her sister-in-law’s home in Spotsylvania. Mikhael was born with a rare combination of heart defects.
Isaiah Valdez (left) plays with his cousin, Mikhael Perez Cevilla. The toddler recovered from open-heart surgery and is healthy.
Mikhael Perez Cevilla looks up at his mother, Rosa Cevilla Bonilla (left), while they wait to see the doctor at the Children’s Heart Institute in Fredericksburg on Friday, Feb. 25, 2022.
Rosa Cevilla Bonilla holds her son, Mikhael Perez Cevilla, as he receives an echocardiogram at the Children’s Heart Institute in Fredericksburg on Friday, Feb. 25, 2022.
Mikhael developed a purplish tinge soon after he was born due to his heart issues.
Mikhael Perez Cevilla was 2 months old when he had open heart surgery.
Doctors, and his own family, were amazed at how quickly Mikhael Perez Cevilla recovered from open heart surgery. This photo was taken less than a week after his chest was cut open.
Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.