'Amazing' Baby Who Was Born Weighing 2 Lbs. Home for Thanksgiving After 158 Days in the Hospital

Colleen Weimer

Born following a tough pregnancy, little “Sully Bear" underwent major heart surgery for a rare cardiac birth defect and spent 158 days in the NICU at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She finally made it home in September.

From the beginning, Weimer, 37, said she knew there was a “possibility” that she could havepreeclampsia —a serious blood pressure condition during pregnancy, per the Cleveland Clinic — which she experienced while pregnant with 7-year-old daughter Quinn, who was born at 28 weeks.

“So we went somewhere locally and did that and when they did that, [another doctor] still felt like things didn’t look totally normal,” she adds. “She thought she saw something calledtransposition of the great arteries, which is when your aorta and your pulmonary artery are switched so your blood can’t oxygenate.”

That’s when she and her husband were recommended to go to CHOP. And when she was around 22 weeks pregnant, Dr. Elizabeth Goldmuntz, an attending cardiologist in the Cardiac Center at CHOP, confirmed Sully had a congenital heart defect and would need open heart surgery after she was born.

“We were just hopeful that we could get the pregnancy as far as we could,” she says.

Still, after her little Sully Bear was born, Weimer tells PEOPLE that doctors were worried she wouldn’t survive.

“She was so tiny at that point that they didn’t know she would make it through an open-heart surgery,” says the mom.

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Sully ultimately bounced between the NICU and CICU until she was about 5 weeks old, when doctors finally determined it was time for her to undergo an open-heart surgical procedure called theArterial Switch operation to reconstruct her heart.

The hospital says the procedure has been performed since the 1960s, but it was rare to perform on babies as small as Sully, who only weighed about 3.5 lbs on surgery day.

Reflecting on that scary time, Weimer says she is deeply thankful for her “really supportive family,” like her parents and mother-in-law who took care of Quinn and 9-year-old Reid as the family lived about two hours away from the hospital.

“With her being so unstable, I didn’t ever really feel comfortable going home,” the mom adds.

“After everything that she’s been through, it’s just absolutely amazing that she could come through it and just have the sweetest little personality, and we just absolutely adore her,” Weimer says.

source: people.com