You can hear Dylan Riches’ voice tense up as he recalls what he describes as the worst 10 days of his life. It started out as what was supposed to be one of the happiest; the birth of his daughter, Maliyah.
Dylan Riches and his daughter Maliyah at left today and at right, Maliyah soon after she was born in 2020.
He was still taking that information in when another doctor came in five minutes later and told him that they didn’t have time for a C-section. “I always kind of describe it as the bell curve of like six sigma,” Riches says. “Like it was incredibly problematic, one thing after another, and then once all of these department heads started to really assign themselves to Maliyah 24 hours a day and their team — I think collectively there were 30 people working on it — as things got better, everything started to get better.
“This is a baby who goes to bed asleep straight for 12 hours and wakes up happy,” Riches says. “It’s truly like a dramatic change from how she was born. It’s incredible what happened.”While Maliyah’s health has changed dramatically, the overwhelming gratitude her parents feel toward the hospital staff has not.“I think it was this feeling of what a wonderful life we live to be able to have immediate care given to us round the clock from probably some of the smartest people in medicine,” he says.