'We're well on the way to getting our old Mavi back'

On her family’s longest day, Dalia Valle found her kid brother Maverick slumped in snow in their east end schoolyard.

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He was sobbing.

“Mavi,” Dalia said, “what’s wrong?”

“My head really hurts,” he replied.

She helped him to the office, which called their mom, Janna. It was last Jan. 27.

When Janna got there, Maverick was beet red and vomiting, his speech garbled. He kept mumbling, “I need to go to sleep now.”

In Scarborough General’s emergency ward, at the age of 6, “Mavi pretty much died in my arms,” says Janna. Her son’s eyes glazed over. They rolled back in his head. He went limp.

“I started to scream and they scooped him up and took him to a room. Thirty people, it seemed like, all rushed in.”

The PA speakers called out “Code Pink.” It’s the worst code. It means a kid’s in cardiac arrest. There was a lot of yelling and tubes and chest compressions. A hospital clergyman showed up.

“I did not want to see him, or talk to him,” Janna tells me.

The gravity struck home when Mavi’s dad, Mario, began to cry.

They took Maverick on an ambulance run downtown to Sick Kids hospital. Toronto Police cruisers stopped Friday rush-hour traffic.

It wasn’t Mavi’s heart. It was his brain. A blood vessel in his cerebellum had ruptured in two places. It was a classic “ticking time bomb,” a malformed vein waiting to explode.

A Sick Kids surgeon removed a fist-sized piece of Mavi’s skull, went in and staunched the bleeding, then installed a drain … and so began the long road back for Maverick Valle.

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