Medically Complex and the Stories of Our Lives

Photo Credit RacingAwareness.com We don't know what to say, or how to say it.  I hope our faces-at least in part--spoke of our  gratitude  for your organization RacingAwareness.com , and for your kindness towards total strangers. The past four years have been the hardest years of our lives.  Fraught with constant illnesses, accumulating diagnoses, cancer scares, debilitating malnutrition, and health care split between two different health systems our lives have been forever changed. We have learned to live differently, love differently, and hold on a little tighter to each moment. In the first three and a half years there were no outings, no mom and dad dates, no trips to the beach, just living in the moment--from crisis to crisis and hospitalization to hospitalization.  The past 12 months have not been easy either, with winter virus's constantly beating his little body down, and fighting a never ending battle against weight loss, ma...

When I walked into my house I always went straight into my room, dropped to the floor and sobbed and sobbed.  My daughter Maggey would always  come in and ask, "are you going cry again tonight?"  I would always say, "yes."  I love Rhyse just as much as I love you and I miss him.  She would tell me she would "be there" for me, whatever I needed. Rhyse's crib is in my room.  I think that made my heart bleed all the more.  I got to the point I could not look at the empty crib at the end of my bed anymore.  It just tore me up inside. While Rhyse was in the NICU he had two bone aspirations and two heart ultrasounds.  The heart ultrasounds did show two ASDs and cardiomyopathy.  But the heart defects were minor and merely needed to be monitored.  It was the bone aspirations that were critical in their findings.  By the second bone aspiration the doctors determined Leukemia was looking less likely and Noonans more ...