This story starts with a photograph. It’s June 20, 2013, and I’m meeting with Justin Bell to discuss artwork for this book. As we eat our burgers at O’Reilly’s Pub on High Street, Justin pulls out his laptop and places it on the table.
“There’s a picture that really speaks to me,” he says. “You’ve probably seen it, but here it is.” The following photo pops up on his screen.
(Photo by Kevin Moore)
“I found this picture online a while ago and it's always stuck with me,” Justin says after a thoughtful gaze. “This picture tells me a lot about what kind of person Kirk must have been. Players have to walk out with kids all the time, and when you do it a thousand times, it just becomes this thing you do. It's just sort of, 'Yeah, yeah, hey kid,' and you do it and then it's done. But in this picture, this kid is talking to Kirk and you can see that Kirk is really paying attention to him. He's in the moment with this kid and they are having an actual conversation. This picture says so much to me.”
Justin’s intuition hasn’t failed him.
On an otherwise unremarkable spring day in 2007, Emilie Moore of Lebanon, Ohio, went to the hospital to be induced into labor. Everything about her pregnancy was normal. A 3-D ultrasound showed her the baby’s face “just as clear as if I had been holding him in my arms.” Ryan would the fourth child born to Emilie and her husband Kevin, so she knew what to expect during childbirth.
Ryan stubbornly refused hints that it was time to move out of the comfortable confines of the womb, so it became a waiting game throughout the rest of the night. Early the next morning, Ryan began his entrance into this world. Kevin had his camera at the ready, prepared to document the miracle of life.
Then Kevin turned off the camera. Additional medical personnel rushed into the room. Emilie was told that Ryan’s shoulder was stuck. After a few minutes of protracted extraction efforts, Ryan Moore was finally delivered.
The sound of a crying baby is a nuisance at a restaurant, a nightmare on an airplane, and should be a misdemeanor in a movie theater. To parents, the sound of a crying baby can also be cause for concern. Is the baby hurt? Is it hungry? Is it tired? It’s an alarm call for parental care and response. The one and only time that a baby’s cry sounds like symphonic bliss and can be considered an unquestionably joyous occurrence is in the delivery room. Those wails are the result of tiny lungs trumpeting the arrival of a new life.
Kevin and Emilie Moore heard no such fanfare.
The Connor Senn Memorial Match is an annual event on the campus of Ohio State University. The match is a fundraiser held in memory of the Buckeye defender who went from walk-on to starter in his freshman year, then collapsed on the field during a game at Akron on September 26, 2001. Senn passed away that night as a result of what was later determined to be a congenital heart defect.
Working hand in hand with the Senn family, the Buckeyes and Columbus Crew began staging an annual memorial game to raise funds for the establishment of an Ohio State scholarship in Senn’s name and to fund further research into sudden cardiac death caused by congenital heart defects in young athletes.
Senn was known as a friendly teammate and a hard worker, and “Play like Connor today” has become the mantra of the Ohio State soccer program. The annual memorial match further cemented Senn’s legacy at Ohio State, and Connor’s memory served as the impetus for the Central Ohio soccer community’s commitment to the study, detection, and treatment of congenital heart defects.
The Crew and Buckeyes squared off in the 11th annual Connor Senn Memorial Match on Tuesday, May 1, 2012. It would be the last time that Kirk Urso took the field in a Columbus Crew uniform.
In those first few moments of his life, Ryan Moore turned an ever-deepening shade of blue. His blood oxygen levels registered in the 40s, whereas a normal reading is in the 92-100 range. Emilie was given the briefest of moments to hold and kiss her son, then Ryan was whisked out of the room. “I think the nurses were afraid whether or not I would ever get to hold him alive again,” Emilie recalls.
Hours later, doctors informed Kevin and Emilie that Ryan had a heart defect that was preventing oxygen from getting into his bloodstream. In the womb, babies have a hole in their hearts that serves as an oxygen intake. As soon as they are born, the hole closes quickly and normal heart function begins. Since Ryan’s heart was not functioning properly, he was placed on medication that would keep the hole open, plus he was put on a ventilator in an effort to get more oxygen into his blood.
The next several hours were a blur of tubes, wires, medications, tests, and an emergency transfer from Mercy-Fairfield Hospital to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Emilie is a Registered Nurse. Kevin is Critical Care Paramedic, who essentially works in an emergency room on wheels. On this day, their extensive medical knowledge was a curse, as every overheard conversation wasn’t a meaningless barrage of background medical jargon, but comprehensible tidbits of distressing information.
At long last, the Moores had answers. The pulmonary valve in Ryan’s heart would not open. Open heart surgery would eventually be required, but at that moment, the doctors could open the valve using a catheter and a balloon.
“It’s hard to imagine all those people had equipment small enough to work on our son’s heart that was the size of a walnut, but they did,” Emilie says.
After the procedure, Ryan’s condition declined instead of improved. One of his ventricles was too small because of the valve problem. He became bloated due to the IV fluids needed to bring up his faltering blood pressure. His lab results continued to be consistent with heart failure, so he remained on his medicines and on the ventilator.
In the next several days, Ryan would start getting better. Slowly but surely, he started coming off of his medications. Eventually, there were attempts to take him off of the respirator to see if he could breathe on his own. The first two attempts were not successful, but the third try, Ryan filled his little lungs with air.
“After a few very long seconds we heard the smallest, wimpiest little cry we had ever heard,” Emilie says. “But it was music to our ears. We will never forget that sound.”
And with that, the improvements snowballed. Ryan got stronger and stronger. Instead of being fed through a nose tube, he was finally able to take a bottle. The rest of his test results returned to normal ranges. A scan of his brain revealed no internal bleeding as a result of his ordeal.
11 days after he was born, Ryan Moore went home to an uncertain future. The excitement the Moores felt at finally being a family again was also tempered by fear and anxiety. Ryan was going to need an estimated 5-7 open heart surgeries in his lifetime. Doctor appointments, heart catheters, electrocardiograms, echocardiograms, and other tests would be a regular part of life. After his one-year check-up, the required appointments became less and less frequent, finally shifting to annual appointments by the time he was three years old. Once Ryan was old enough to no longer require sedation for the procedures, the checkups became less stressful for the Moores. Even better was that Ryan’s condition was stable enough that the Moores have been able to hold off on the first open heart surgery. This is crucial, because if Ryan can make it to seven years old before the first one, he will likely need only 3-4 open heart surgeries in his lifetime as opposed to 5-7. Replacement valves implanted inside of infant hearts require frequent replacement as the baby grows. Making it to the age of seven would allow for larger valves to be implanted.
Emilie feels blessed. “So far, our courageous little boy has beaten all the odds.”
Mended Little Hearts is an organization that aims to provide hope and support to the families of children with congenital heart defects. The goal is to extend and improve the quality of life for those impacted. The Moores find the emotional support to be invaluable.
“We get together once a month,” Emilie says. “Our children play together and the parents get a chance to talk to other parents who are going through the same thing we are. The group has made a tremendous impact on us.”
In the spring of 2012, the group would unknowingly make an even bigger impact. The Columbus chapter of Mended Little Hearts invited the Moores to join them on the field prior to the Connor Senn Memorial Match. Ryan would be able to walk one of the 22 players onto the field. As Crew season ticket holders, the Moores jumped at the opportunity.
“We were all very excited,” Emilie says. “Three of our favorite things wrapped into one night, and all for our great cause that we have been battling at that point for five years—Ohio State, the Crew, and soccer…who could ask for a better combination?”
Five-year-old Ryan was joined by one of his brothers, Brayden, and one of his sisters, Sami, as player escorts.
“The kids were so excited,” Emilie says. “Ryan especially, because he knew it was ‘his night’ and he would be on the field with his favorite soccer team. The kids were lining up and Ryan ended up with Kirk that night.”
Ryan walked Kirk onto the field, and that’s when Kevin snapped the iconic photograph of the two of them in mid-conversation.
“I could see Ryan talking intently to Kirk and see how Kirk was just soaking it all in,” recalls Emilie. “I remember telling my husband that I wish I could hear what he was saying. Kevin joked back saying he was probably giving Kirk some pointers. I remember our conversation vividly because it was at that point that Ryan's life was changed forever, but we didn't even know it.”
It would be months before Emilie Moore would learn the details of her son’s on-field conversation with Kirk Urso.
[Continued in the book...]
To read the rest of the chapter about Kirk and Ryan’s incredible story, as well as to learn how the type of research supported by the Kirk Urso Memorial Fund can have a life-altering impact on families like the Moores, please purchase Kirk Urso: Forever Massive. All proceeds go to the Kirk Urso Memorial Fund for congenital heart defect research.
