“I’d carried her 9 months and soon doctors would be taking her away from me to save her life. ‘When can I see my baby?’ I asked the nurse. ‘Not yet.’ I was finally able to gaze at her through a plastic incubator. There were wires all over her new skin and into her tiny little nose, tape securing them down. But nothing could ever steal away what she was. Beautiful.”
“He had recently started taking gummy vitamins and drinking 2-3 glassed of milk each day so he could ‘buff up his bones.’ In that conversation he mentioned the ‘pass out challenge,’ but he did not elaborate, and with much regret, neither did I.”
“We were given the news that chemo would cause us infertility. Always being the patient, I’d never known what it meant to be on the other side of it. To watch your loved one suffer and feel so completely helpless your insides were miserably aching. But that was all about to change. How did this happen? What about all our plans and the family we were going to have? I was headed down the road to be a widow before we even had a chance to experience marriage.”
“Two ladies were standing in the doorway. I questioned how they found out. My father was going to be so angry. I screamed, ‘Where are you taking my sister?!’ Why were they doing this? She was all I had.”
“The full-time job, cooking dinner, bathing kids, weekend trips without him, keeping up a home. You name it, I was resenting it. Then this happened.”
“As I looked at the plate of cookies, sure enough, there was a cookie angel I had decorated. I smiled at my daughter as my eyes welled up with tears.”
“Please reconsider the use of bunk beds/loft beds for your kids, even with a safety rail.”
“Now I was really scared. Here I am, 19 years old, with a kid – a special needs kid at that – and totally alone.”
“My honest thought when I first saw her was, ‘It wasn’t supposed to be this bad.’ Our doctor didn’t say anything. The nurses were silent. Emmy was silent. It was eerie and terrifying. We know she will always look different and will face bullies in her lifetime, but our goal is to always show her how loved she truly is.”
In February, we launched Love What Matters with the dream of building a community around hope, support, compassion, healing and kindness. From day one, you embraced us with open arms, learning, opening up and connecting with one other. Today, we’re proud Love What Matters has two stories on the 2018 Chartbeat List of Most Engaging …
