‘Kind of a miracle’

Tyler Reynolds almost never had the chance to be a Portland Rocket.
Sherry Reynolds still gets uneasy recalling what it was like waiting for her son to undergo surgery in July 1991, just weeks after he was born.
“It was horrible. It was unimaginable.”
The only child of Muncie residents Sherry and Tony Reynolds, Tyler suffered from TAPVR, or total anomalous pulmonary venous return.
TAPVR is a rare heart defect in which the four pulmonary veins are positioned incorrectly and connect to the heart abnormally. Since his veins were not hooked up the right way, Tyler’s blood was circulating on the wrong side of his heart and he was not getting enough oxygen.
As is the situation with all TAPVR cases, he needed immediate surgery.
But after rushing to Riley Hospital in Indianapolis, they found out the surgeon — Dr. John Brown — was out of the state performing a similar emergency surgery.
“Most babies who have this never go home from the hospital,” said Sherry, who at the time was a nurse at Ball Memorial Hospital. “We spent the weekend knowing full well our baby was having congestive heart failure. He had this ungodly defect and the doctor couldn’t see him until Monday.”
Over that weekend, during which Sherry said she and her husband barely slept, nurses at Riley did what they could to keep Tyler stable until Brown arrived.
Fortunately for Tyler, he also had an atrial septal defect, which allows blood to flow from one chamber of the heart to the other. That kept him alive until Brown arrived.
After a seven-hour procedure first thing Tuesday morning, Tyler’s heart was functioning normally. The success rate of the surgery, Sherry was told, was 90 percent — assuming Tyler’s previously overworked heart settled down.
If he were born at a different time, the odds of making it through the surgery were stacked against him. Tony said had he been born five years earlier, his chance of survival was just 50 percent.
Clearly he has no recollection of the surgery, just what he has been told by his family members. Because Sherry didn’t want any visual reminders of one of the scariest times in her life, only one picture exists of Tyler immediately following the surgery.
“My husband’s grandma took a picture,” Sherry said. “I didn’t let people take any pictures because I didn’t want to remember it by looking at it.”
As a child, Tyler’s cardiologists told him he would never be able to play contact sports, which came as a surprise to the slender redhead.
“I wanted to play with all my friends,” he said. “That’s what we did as kids — we all played sports. Whether it was two-hand touch football in the street (or) basketball in the street, we did everything together.”
Forgoing football, Tyler decided to take up the game of baseball, and he excelled.
He went on to star at Muncie Southside High School and later played at Indiana Tech. He finished up his senior season for the Warriors this spring.
For the past four years, Reynolds has spent his summers playing in Portland, and has solidified himself as one of the top starting pitchers on the roster.
Reynolds sports a 5-2 record this season with 53 strikeouts, 15 walks and a 2.17 ERA, helping the Rockets to a 26-13 record.
Other than developing asthma, Tyler didn’t have any setbacks with his health since the surgery as an infant.
But baseball brought one big scare, at least for Sherry. When Tyler was 12, he was pitching in a game at Thomas Park in Muncie when he was hit in the chest by a line drive.
“From what I remember, I threw the pitch, it came back at me and taking the defensive approach I put my pitching hand back up to protect me,” Tyler said. “It went right through (the gap between) my pointer and thumb and got me right in the chest.”
Sherry was on the other side of the field from the entrance and when she saw Tyler collapse to the ground, she darted over to the gate to get on the field and tend to her son.
The coach wouldn’t let her on the field, playing it off as if it wasn’t a big deal and telling Sherry not to worry because “it’s not like he had heart surgery or anything,” she recalled.
Sherry fired back, yelling that her son did indeed have heart surgery.
But Tyler had a check-up with a cardiologist the next day and everything with his chest was fine, with exception of the mark left by the ball — laces and all.
All that remains from surgery and two-week stay in the hospital is a nine-inch scar on his chest, a “second belly button” above his naval and a red bump on his back from one of the many tubes connected to him after the operation.
Tyler’s recovery even came as a surprise to one of the nurses who treated him during his teenage years. She had previously worked in the neonatal intensive care unit, and wanted to see Tyler after she heard about his full recovery. She had never seen someone who had survived the condition.
Hearing the nurse say her son was the only survivor she had ever seen, Sherry was reassured her son was someone special.
“He is kind of a miracle,” she said.