Docs Dismiss Newborn’s Grunts but It Was Heart Failure

Doctors dismissed a newborn’s “grunting” as normal sounds — but six weeks later, the baby was intubated in the PICU, and is now awaiting a heart transplant. 

Stephanie Mulhall-Atkinson, 37, and Justin Atkinson, 33, welcomed daughter Sloane in October 2024. The couple, who live in Canada, worried about the noises she made and alerted medical staff.

“We raised concern to many different doctors and nurses while we were in the hospital for five days post-birth, including the pediatrician,” Stephanie told Daily Mail. “They all said that her lungs sounded clear, so she was fine, and that she was just a vocal baby making normal baby sounds.”

When the couple took Sloane home, the grunting continued — and Stephanie tells the outlet that her baby soon began developing other symptoms. She was extra fussy, and often unusually sweaty. On November 30, when Sloan was around six-and-a-half weeks old, she developed a “very faint blue tint around her mouth” and stopped eating, Stephanie says. They rushed her to the emergency room.

At the hospital, Sloane “was making her grunting noises. As soon as the doctors heard the noises, they asked if she had always done that,” Stephanie said. She explained to the doctors that they had previously been told her noises weren’t a cause for concern. “We were then told that it actually is a sign of distress and not normal at all. Everything escalated from there.”

A scan of the infant’s heart showed she had dilated cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disease that causes the chambers to grow larger, making it harder for the heart to pump blood effectively. It’s a common cause of heart failure, the Mayo Clinic says. 

Sloane was in end stage heart failure — and would need a heart transplant to survive. ‘Her heart is barely pumping’ is all we really remember hearing,” Stephanie says. “She was rushed up to the PICU, sedated and intubated immediately.”

“There are no words to describe those first acute days and weeks and hearing that your tiny baby needs a heart transplant. Your brain cannot comprehend that,” Stephanie says.

“How do you even begin to process except by holding onto ALL the hope. Our girl will be OKAY. She has to be. Her life will be long, full, and beautiful. We know it,” Stephanie wrote in a GoFundMe she established to help pay for Sloane’s care. “This will be her story to tell one day.”

The family shares that they were “devastated and angry” to learn that their daughter’s grunting “meant she had been in distress that whole time.”  

Sloane has been living in the hospital ever since — and as Stephanie shared in an update to the GoFundMe, is 193 on the transplant list.

“Every time we see certain nurses and doctors we wonder, holding our breath hoping it’s Sloane’s time. We know it will come … it still could be today and it still could be a year from now.,” she wrote. “One day it WILL happen.”

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