Noah Devolve, 9

Biography

An hour after Noah was born via cesarean section, he started turning blue, said his mother, Melissa Devolve. She said the doctors at Memorial couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

“They didn’t really have the diagnostics at the time,” she said.

So Noah was airlifted to Denver Children’s Hospital, where doctors intentionally punctured a hole in his heart to let blood flow properly to his lungs.

“The layperson name we use (for the condition) is ‘total vein.’ Basically, the vein that connects his heart to his lungs was blocked,” Devolve said.

The problem hadn’t appeared during Devolve’s pregnancy. A fetus doesn’t breathe -- it gets oxygen from the mother’s blood, says the Merck online medical library. So the way blood circulates through the heart and lungs is different in a fetus than in a child or adult.

Since Noah was delivered by C-section,  Devolve was out of it for much of the initial chaos. But eventually she awoke to the horror that her baby was in intensive care.

“I don’t think there’s a word in our language, quite frankly,” to describe how she felt.

She said all the little things she’d worried about during pregnancy suddenly seemed insignificant.

“The funny thing is, I remember going to all the nursing classes, the birthing classes, and I didn’t want anyone to give him a binky. And all of a sudden, as things were unraveling, I was like, ‘Wow. You can give him a lollipop if he’s OK!’”
 
Noah had successful open-heart surgery 18 days later.

Then, “It was a whirlwind of a year. He got sick a lot. When he got a stomach virus, he’d end up in the ER,” Devolve said.

But nine years later, on Nov. 28, the home-schooled third-grader received his black belt in tae kwon do during a ceremony at Liberty High School.

Devolve said the only lasting effect of his heart defect is recurrent croup.

Since then, the Devolves added another member to the family.

“We had Ben, and he’s healthy as a horse, full of spit and vinegar. Then we stopped there. We really wanted another one but it is a genetic defect.”

Devolve added that Noah’s defect “isn’t really a big deal. … We were the lucky ones. I think now we appreciate how fragile life is, and it really does change your outlook on life and illness.”

Read the personal account Devolve wrote for FreshInk (which includes the former YourHub content) by clicking here.


Q&A with Noah

How long have you been practicing tae kwon do?
“For about 3½ years.”

What skills do you learn in tae kwon do?
“It is mostly kicks, mostly feet techniques, then hands.”

How does someone earn a black belt?
“You go through a whole 2½ years of training first — 2½ to 3½ years of training — and you do about 13 tests. And then for the final black-belt tests, there are basically two tests and then a demo.”

What are the tests like?
“The first test is the curriculum test, and the second is the fitness test.”

Noah said there is a kicking set and a blocking set “where you do all these breaks and blocks.”

“Then there is forms, where it’s a combination of kicking and blocking, and then you put it all together into a routine.

“And then they do hogu drills, where you wear a hogu — it’s a chest guarder — and you do all these kicks on this bag.

“And then you do self-defense. And that is when you practice doing the actual self-defense. So if someone grabs you, you have like 25 different self-defense moves.

“And there are about two takedowns where …. you trip them under the feet and, when they fall down, you do one little punch.”

And, of course, Noah had to learn what to do with all those self-defense moves:

“Once you do one to a bad guy, then you run away. You don’t want to stick around, in case some of his buddies are hanging around. You don’t know what kind of tricks they have.”

Were a lot of people watching you at the black-belt ceremony?
“Actually, when you’re sitting down … when you look around, it doesn’t look like there’s that many. Then when you’re behind the curtains and you’re looking out to them, it looks (like) twice as many.”

What do you want to be when you grow up?
“Slave freer in Africa.”

Why’s that?
“I always wanted to do something that will help other people. And I decided that this is a bit riskier than most jobs, but … it’s really worth it.”

Besides tae kwon do, what do you enjoy doing?
“I took football for a little bit. And gymnastics.”

But you like tae kwon the best?
“Yeah, I really think that once you get into some martial art, you think it’s just nothing to beat it. And then you get into some other martial arts, and then you want to get into more. I’m thinking of learning tai chi.”

Where you do learn tae kwon do?
“A.L.L. Taekwondo — Academy of Life and Leadership.”