“At 12 years old, everything shifted. My life as I knew it changed forever. Our family physician called us late one night when he saw the test results. ‘I just don’t know what to make of this.’ Even the lightest touch of a cotton ball could bring me to tears. My foot was drastically changing colors and temperatures.”
“I don’t want to take that mental health risk, so I’ll send them. But, now I’m greedy and don’t care about the teachers. Okay, so I’ll send them… but, we have to skip Thanksgiving, Christmas, and birthday parties. Now, my kids are upset. They miss their family.”
“I bought a shirt that said, ‘Shhh, I have a secret, I’m going to be a big brother’ for my son to wear but I forgot it. I am a very superstitious person and this was the first bad omen I felt. All the blood rushed out of my head.”
“The doctors hit us with a heavy blow. ‘She won’t be able to walk. Ever.’ We tried to memorize how she looked with two little legs.”
“Tate was having some seizure activity. ‘He’s not going to get better.’ I crumbled all over again with strangers and secretaries staring at me. ‘Anyone else would be driving as fast as they could towards a hospital, and you guys are driving as fast as you can away from it.’”
“I cried to the nurse on the hotline, ‘It sounds like he has fluid in his chest.’ I would sit nursing my son, crying endlessly in that rocking chair. Every breath my son took heightened my already over-the-top anxiety attack. I knew it wasn’t just anxiety. It was something more. This was the start of so many triggers.”
“I was secretly hoping for a girl, but the sonographer told us it was a boy. I looked at Austin, smiled, and said, ‘At least we make healthy boys.’ The sonographer’s reaction was a little startling. She said, ‘Well, wait…’ She couldn’t get a good view of his heart, but she didn’t know why.”
“I was allowed no monitors to check on my baby during labor. I didn’t have a clue whether or not he was still alive. I was left in the dark. At 23 weeks, I didn’t dare look as I pushed him out. He was put into a small plastic bag, intubated at my side. I told my family, ‘This is the end.’ We planned his final outfit, said goodbye. Just in the nick of time, he showed us he wasn’t going anywhere.”
“I knew something was wrong. A nurse came in and said Ellis had stopped breathing in the nursery twice. ‘She’s at high risk for significant developmental disabilities.’ He encouraged my husband and I to have a conversation about what to do if our baby didn’t wake up.”
”Right before I was wheeled into the OR we discovered he, too, was not only a Buckeye but also graduated from the same small high school I graduated from. It gave all of us much more reassurance I was exactly where I needed to be at the exact right time. Mini miracle inside a big miracle.”
