Faith Sustains Family Through Son's Health Scare
by David Dufek | December 15, 2025
Monika Nedved actually thought he might have swallowed a Lego.
It was New Year's Eve, 2023. Luke, her toddler, was sick. Not the terrifying "heart sick" she was used to, but just regular toddler sick. He was throwing up. He was lethargic. So she sat in a rocking chair in the dark, holding him all night, racking her brain. Did he eat a toy? Is it a stomach bug?
By 6:00 a.m., the sun wasn't quite up over Des Moines, but there was enough light to see the one thing she didn't want to see.
"His lips are white," she told her husband, Michael.
They knew the drill. They had to. Luke was born with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, meaning he effectively has half a heart. He’d already been through open-heart surgeries at eight days and five months old. Monika and Michael knew hospitals. They knew fear. But they didn't know they were about to spend the next few months praying for a transplant. And they definitely didn't know they would end up in a storage closet in Omaha, praying for a miracle.
At the time, Monika, Michael and their children were parishioners of St. Theresa in Des Moines and Monika taught math at Dowling Catholic High School.
The Supply Closet
Luke had been life-flighted to Omaha from Des Moines, and had been doing well, with a discharge date set for January 29. But he relapsed, and then the plan changed frantically from “home” to “heart transplant.”
On February 1, the medical team was planning to intubate him for transfer to St. Louis when his oxygen numbers tanked, dropping into the 40s.
Suddenly, the room was full because the crash happened right at shift change. Thirty people, the night team and the day team, were all swarming Luke, trying to save him. They performed CPR for 19 minutes.
Monika tried to push past a doctor. "I need to go to my baby," she said. "I need to give him one more kiss."
She couldn't stay. She and Michael were steered out into the waiting room. It was an awful place to be … exposed, public. Strangers were walking by with coffee, totally oblivious that CPR was being performed on a toddler just a few feet away. Monika and Michael broke down. They were screaming, sobbing...
That’s when Tiffany found them.
She was a night nurse who pulled them into the only private space she could find: a supply closet.
"She just rubbed my back for what felt like forever," Monika says. "She didn’t say anything, nor did I … To me, it felt so Christ-like just to be present. I felt this wave of love come from her."
The Tear
Luke survived the 19 minutes of CPR. Doctors put him on ECMO, a machine that does the work for the heart and lungs. To let his body rest, they also had to put him on paralytics.
For six days, he was just ... absent. Luke lay perfectly still. He couldn't squeeze a hand. He couldn't blink.
“We really weren't rosary prayers before all this, but I started when Luke was born, and every day he was inpatient, I prayed the rosary,” she said.
"One day, right when we finished and said our last 'Amen,' a single tear rolled down Luke's cheek," Monika says.
Medically, that shouldn't have happened. He had no muscle control. A paralytic takes that away. But Monika didn't care about the medical explanation.
"That tear was a sign of life," she says. "Okay, he’s still in there. He can hear us."
The God Winks
The transplant eventually happened in St. Louis, after weeks in Omaha’s ICU. But moving there meant saying goodbye to the team in Omaha, including Dr. Ali, a surgeon who had really bonded with Luke. When it was time to transfer, Dr. Ali walked in. He didn’t say a word to Monika or Michael. He walked straight to Luke, put his hand on him, and just wept.
Monika watched him cry. "I’m sure he was praying," she says. She doesn't know what his religion is, and she doesn't care. She just saw the love.
Luke got his heart. A donor heart. It's a gift Monika still struggles to wrap her mind around.
They moved to Council Bluffs, placing them just across the river from Luke’s medical team in Omaha, and are now parishioners of St. Patrick. But the "God winks" – Monika’s term for those little nudges from God – kept happening. They bought a house and found out the neighbor across the street was a retired cardiologist. Then they met the neighbors down the street: a family who had lost a 15-year-old daughter and become huge advocates for organ donation in her honor.
Monika sat down to write a letter to Luke’s donor family. She had been putting it off. The gratitude felt too heavy for a sheet of paper. But she forced herself to sit down and write it.
The moment she put the pen down, she walked outside for some air. At that exact second, the organ donation advocate who Monika says "normally doesn't take walks" was walking past her driveway.
"I got chills," she says. "And to me, the chills are like the Holy Spirit, you know, just like something is saying ‘Yep, that was me. Hello.’"
The Turkey Sandwich
How do they parent their older boys, Adam and Noah, while worrying about Luke? How does one survive the days when they felt, as Monika puts it, she felt a little "crusty" from forgotten showers and nights in hospital chairs?
One day at a time.
They don't plan years in advance. They plan for bedtime. They ask each other, "What was the best thing about today?"
Sometimes, the answer is big. Sometimes, Monika says, "It’s just that I had a turkey sandwich."
And that’s enough.
She thinks that the struggle has made them better, and feels their older boys are more empathetic. "I feel we do a lot less judging as a family. You just don’t know people’s story, until you maybe stop and ask."
And his name is intentional. “Luke means light-giving, so he’s our little ray of light.”
They are back home now. The storms have settled, mostly. But Monika still remembers the closet. She remembers the tear. She remembers that when everything was falling apart, God didn't show up with a lightning bolt.
He showed up as a nurse who knew when to stay quiet, and a neighbor who decided, for no reason at all, to take a walk.