Looking at him now, you’d never guess that 9-month old Bennett Villeneuve nearly died on Thanksgiving.

Back then, he was only two weeks old, and had started acting differently. On the holiday itself, he began throwing up and choking on it. So his mother, Brooke, brought him to the hospital in Deer River.

His father, David, had been working. “She called me and told me she was bringing him in. I thought it was just the flu,” David shared.

It was much worse than that. Staff checked his heart rate when he got to the hospital. “It was so high they thought the machine was broken,” shared Brooke.

In the ambulance on the way to Duluth, it was 280. Normal for an infant is 90 to 160.

When Dr. Steven Haasken heard the high number, he suspected it was SVT, Supraventricular tachycardia.

They gave him medication, which didn’t have an effect at first. The second dose, his heart went into another form of SVT. “It just made me concerned that his heart was sicker than he was appearing,” Haasken said.

They consulted with Children’s Minnesota, and their transport team flew up from the cities to get Bennett.

“Collaboration with care teams locally is such an important part of Children Minnesota’s approach to babies like Bennett,” shared Dr. Tom George, a neonatologist there.

The teams wanted Bennett’s heart rate to stabilize before he left Duluth. Medication worked, but not before almost losing him.

“It was really scary for everyone involved,” Dr. Haasken remembered. “We all worked as hard as we could to try and get him through.”

Meanwhile, Brooke and David drove down to Children’s in their own vehicle.

Between the staff at the two hospitals, a diagnosis of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome.

“It’s like an extra electrical pathway in his heart,” Brooke explained.

Once at Children’s, Bennett made a quick turnaround within 6 hours, and was sent home a week later.

With medication every eight hours, he’s doing just great. His parents do check his heart rate every now and again.

They are so glad things worked out the way they did. “We were told, if we hadn’t brought him in that day, he would not have survived the night. So I always say, follow your mom instincts,” Brooke said.

The saying goes, it takes a village. For Bennett, that means medical teams, mom and dad, from rural Minnesota to the metro.

“That’s the real beauty of pediatric critical care. Most of our patients get better and most go on to a full recovery and live happy and productive lives,” Haasken added.

Bennett will need a procedure closer to kindergarten as well.