“Silently, he began drawing on a blank piece of paper. When he was done, he turned to us, showed us his drawing, and began explaining what our future would look like. I started bawling. But we knew we needed to do it.”
‘Hi, I was 5 minutes away from calling you.’ Our baby’s heart was not sitting on the left side of her chest, but shifted to the right side. My stomach dropped with those words.’
‘Her piercing blue eyes were mesmerizing. ‘This will be too much for your family to handle,’ we heard. ‘She will live in total darkness. Total silence.’
“We woke to a text. These people helping us couldn’t understand how we could move forward with adoption until we were certain SHE WOULD LIVE. I responded verbatim, ‘WE WANT THIS GIRL NO MATTER WHAT.’”
‘I’m sorry, but we found a mass in your daughter’s brain.’ I thought that would be the worst day of my life. Little did I know, only 13 days later, THAT would actually be the worst day of my life.’
“In a different ER, a few floors below from where my daughter was, another doctor pulled a different curtain, looked at my husband and me, and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Time stopped at that moment.”
‘Mrs. Morgan? We have a 3-year-old little boy in the PICU. He’s been here 6 months and needs a home.’
“‘6 months in the PICU! Why?!’ 3 months, because he was sick. 3 months, because no one would take him home.”
‘I reached into his bassinet. He felt chilly. As I moved to sit up, I noticed it again. ‘Does Judah look blue?’ I lost it. All of it.’
“I had to wait in line for a girl filling out new patient forms… for TWINS!!! Are you kidding me? I huffed, I shifted feet, I inwardly debated and then finally: ‘Um, this is an emergency, my baby isn’t breathing.’”
‘YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.’ I decided enough was enough. Now, I was really scared. Here I am, 19 years old, with a kid – a special needs kid at that – and totally alone.’
“I go to check on Jason before bed. I find him – twitching and unresponsive. I run downstairs, yelling at my dad to call 911. Little did we know, he wouldn’t make it back for his last week of school.”
‘Despite having 5 beautiful children, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that our family was not complete. I looked around and thought, ‘Surely we have room for one more, right?’
“At only 17 years old, while still a senior in high school, I vividly remember the intense fear I felt when I looked at that pregnancy test. What would become of me? I had always been the good girl – the one that got good grades and followed the rules.”
‘A day ago everything was fine, and now I wondered if our baby would survive. We watched as she lay gray and wondered how she had contracted the virus.’
“24 hours after my daughter developed a cough, we were rushed down the halls of the children’s hospital. I asked the nurse if she was going to be okay. She told me, ‘I can’t tell you that she is. We will try our best.'”
‘I got a message about a 19-year-old bride who has cancer. She was told she wouldn’t make it through the night. They had to move her wedding to that very day.’
“Little did I know this one day, this one wedding, and this one bride, would change my life forever.”
‘To the girl who changed my world in 4 minutes and 51 seconds.’
“You had already decided this would be your final surgery. You had courageously fought cancer once, and came out victorious on the other side, only to have the cancer return with a vengeance.”
