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“My name is David Kuntz. I live in Vacaville, California. I work at the University of Phoenix, and I’ve been a volunteer firefighter for nine years.
“We actually met in high school, and then at 24 we ended up getting married. I have two boys. One is Tekoa and he’s four months old right now, and then Zyler who is four years old, who just turned four just a month ago.
“We had two or three miscarriages in between Zyler and this baby, and so all of those ultrasounds were bad news. We ended up going to the ultrasound, and they’d found out that there was something wrong with the baby’s heart. We didn’t know if the baby would make it to term – a lot of anxiety. We just didn’t know. We didn’t have any facts at that time.
“They kind of explained that there were three major surgeries. And, because each time they would have to open the chest and obviously put the child out, two of the three required him to be on a bypass machine, and the first surgery had to be completed when he was only about a week old.
“So we knew we had to prepare for this, but we kind of weren’t sure where to go How do we get there? What is insurance going to cover? If it comes to us having to do the surgery, and there is a lot of out-of-pocket expense, would we have to sell our house and move? That, of course, was something I was concerned with. Just sheer panic – that’s probably the best way to describe it.
“When you go through something like this, UnitedHealthcare will assign you a case manager, and that’s the individual that’s actually going to partner with you to help walk you through the process.
“In my mind, this individual’s goal was to keep costs down. That individual did call, and her name was Rose. She said, ‘Well, where would you like to go?’ I said, ‘I really don’t know.’
“And she had brought up the excellence networks, walked me to that website. I went there and printed it, but it wasn’t something I really looked at because my assumption was that it was going to be a hospital that was in our best interests. Then it was, ‘Well, where are the top hospitals?’ because we were currently looking at two -- both children’s hospitals.
“We had met with the surgeons at both as well as the cardiac individuals and we had found that that was a little bit scary to us only because the mortality rates were a little higher. It was 15% is what the mortality rate is that we were given.
“We had done some research and found that you can actually pull up a list, and it will give you the top 100 children’s hospitals. I looked at that list and I said, ‘Okay, well, these are the top 10, and this is probably where we want to go.
“So then I thought, ‘Well, you know, just for giggles, I’m going to get Rose’s list, centers for excellence, and I’m going to compare them. What I indeed found was the top 10 in the U.S. were – every single one of them was on the network of excellence centers.
“That’s when a ton of stress got alleviated because now I could feel that she wanted to help us. I could feel that she knew where is the best place to go. And I could feel that she genuinely cared. She’s obviously not literally an angel, but I would say that I consider her an angel because she was a huge help to us, and, I really think, like a coach too. I really do think of her as a coach.
“And so we thought, ‘We better get the records to the surgeon to see what is his take on this condition?’ And so he got them and he said, ‘Well, based on what I see, it does look like he is missing a septum, which separates the heart. So it’s accurate what they’ve been telling to you in the forms of Holmes heart.
“And we said, ‘Well, what would you say the mortality rate would be on something like that?’ And he said, ‘Realistically, it’s probably going to be about one to two percent.’ And so for us that was… was… I think that probably explains it. You’re going to go from 15% mortality, meaning 15 out of 100 of these kids don’t make it, to now you’re going to one percent – was just astronomical.
“Not everybody out there is bad. There are good organizations, there are good people out there, and they want to help you.
“Tekoa is about four months now and he’s gained weight faster than our first son did, so he’s really healthy.
“My name is David Kuntz, and this is my health care success story.”
