“Every day I wonder – is today the day we get the call there is a heart for Max? Is today the day my son gets a second chance at life? He is still fighting hard. We refuse to give up on him.”
‘My husband and I watched in horror. ‘Don’t worry, he’s going to be okay.’ I nodded, but all I could think was, ‘NO, my newborn just had heart surgery, NONE of this is okay.’
‘He was yelling down the hospital halls, ‘Best day ever!’ As happy as I was for my son, I felt such sadness for my daughter. She was diagnosed first.’
“Both of our babies had cancer. Even before their diagnoses, they were inseparable, best friends. We sometimes joke, he couldn’t even let his sister go through brain cancer without him.”
‘I arrived weighing only 3-pounds, with my organs outside my body. It was a complete shock to my parents. ‘Everything is fine,’ my guardian angel told my mother to keep her calm.’
“I was bullied for looking different. I would get called ‘inside out girl,’ a ‘freak’ and ‘alien.’ It got nastier, telling me everyone would be happier if I was dead, and that I should kill myself.”
‘It was the middle of the night when I got this call. I sat in the basement, frozen and in shock. Please tell me this is just some virus that will go away next week.’
“We also noticed he had a bruise on his back from one of his Nerf gun battles that wasn’t going away. Nothing crazy, nothing that made us extremely worried at the time.”
‘The lady tells us she will be right back. I didn’t think anything of it, but my husband looks at me. ‘There’s something wrong.’ I will never forget the look in his eyes.’
“She starts to scan his face and tells us he has an abnormality. My emotions got the best of me. Before the doctor punctured my belly, my husband looked to me and said, ‘Do you wanna know?’ I couldn’t even speak.”
‘He looked at me screaming, helpless because he felt they were torturing him. All mommy could do was hold him tight, but not stop them. The room caved in on me. I wasn’t ready.’
“I took him to his pediatrician with no knowledge of what was to happen later that evening. The doctor walked in, looked at his stomach bulging out on the left side, and told me to go straight to the Children’s Hospital.”
‘I went to the appointment, and my life changed. Was I about to die? No, I can’t. I’m not ready! This doesn’t run in my family, and I live a healthy lifestyle.’
“My aunt and grandma went with me to talk to my doctor to try to get further understanding, but to be honest, I didn’t hear a thing she said. My doctor was in tears because she couldn’t understand either.”
‘You gotta believe me, I didn’t do it.’ Those are the words that were said to me, as I got into the car and saw my lifeless child in the backseat.’
“I had just come back from my break when Steven burst through the doors of the store and told me I had to come with him immediately. I raced out to the car, where I saw Logan, in his car seat, turning blue.”
‘I realized I had missed 20 calls from my mom. The night before, her father picked her up and took her home with him. I arrived at the ER very confused. All I remember was her yelling and crying.’
“‘We think you hurt your daughter.’ I burst into tears and cried, ‘There’s no way, I would never hurt her!’ The investigator said, ‘I am sorry I had to do that to you, that is how we expect someone to act when told that. Your husband isn’t acting how we would expect him to.’”
‘I’ve been hiding our family’s ‘secret’ for years. I have been silent. Masking our smiles. Faking OK. A complete nightmare. I am so sick of living in fear.’
“The officer had actually committed suicide and faked his own murder. This brought out things in Ty I had never seen before. Our family has been in nonstop crisis.”