Princess Cloey: May 2011

Monday, May 30, 2011

Cloey's Adventures Week 1

Cloey is now officially on Hospice Service. The process was pretty painless considering the circumstances. Ryan House is an amazing organization and and has made the process fluid, our nurse manager who we will be going through for all our needs is a nurse from Ryan House that we love and trust.

The part that stung the most was telling our favorite night nurse, and having morphine and ativan delivered to the house, which we will need to have on hand for comfort control.

Thankfully, Cloey has been pretty stable, she is tired, but we have not seen an increase in her weakness so far. She is now sharing a room with Lainey and loving it. I love tucking my girls in at night in a "normal" room. We don't have nurses anymore either, it's a little odd since we have had someone around at nights for nearly 5 years.

We have been getting mixed reactions from people as they find out. We have mixed reactions ourselves sometimes. Moments when we cry, feel guilty for not spending enough time with her, questioning if we made the right decisions all along for her, soaking in the joy that is her.

I heard a song from Wicked for the first time this week that reminded me of her. My Cloey Girl, You have changed me FOR GOOD

Thursday, May 19, 2011

A New Chapter for Cloey

After a lot of time praying, researching, talking (sometimes arguing), crying & pondering Ty and I have decided to put Cloey on Hospice service and take her off the her vent (breathing machine). Cloey is a strong little girl and is still able to breath on her own, we hope that by doing this now we are preventing her being completely dependant on machines. We want to give her a chance to be a kid and to be happy. By putting her on Hospice we are not giving up on her, just making sure we have more control of her medical decisions. We will be avoiding the hospital like the plague and doing as little intervention as possible. We will no longer have nurses in our house every night, Cloey and Lainey will get to share a room, we can take her camping, and Cloey will be Home schooled with her brother and sister. Our first instinct was to quit everything and spend every second and dime with her, but we have decided that what Cloey deserves is a "normal" life. We will continue our daily lives and we are going to do as many family activities with her as we can, I hope you will follow them here as I do my best to update weekly on "The Adventures of Cloey"

Some issues Cloey has faced

POTS
Von Willebrand
Ventilator dependant (12 hours)
bone anomalies
numerous infections
hypoglycemic, anemia, malnutrition
excema
at risk melonoma "abnormal birthmark removed"
intestinal deformity
tracheostomy
sleep apnea
sub mucus cleft pallette
esophegial reflux
VSD (hole in her heart) & arythmia
gross & fine motor skills delay
"lazy" eye/ glasses
spinal stenosis/fusion
bladder surgeries
sensory integration disorder
speech/motor planning delay
tonsils and adnoids removed
10 sets of ear tubes
mental retardation
siezures
Failure to thrive

The birth of a miracle

A Mother’s Story
A tiny purple foot. That’s all I could see. There was no, “it’s a girl,” or no “oohs and aahs.” I wasn’t holding her. The room was too quiet. No baby crying – just fast, technical talk between the doctors and nurses. This was the first time I had given birth, maybe this was normal. I just wanted to hold her, but all I could see was a tiny purple foot – shaking. I remember thinking that she must be cold.
Finally a nurse was bringing her over to me – wrapped in a blanket. I thought she was going to hand her to me, but instead she just said, “Kiss her forehead. She has to go upstairs.” I looked at her new daddy and said, “Go with her.” I think he was relieved not to have to make the decision between wife and daughter himself.
As he left the room I realized the prompting I had received months before to be sealed in the LDS temple (married not only for time, but also for eternity, so that we and our children can be together forever) was in preparation for this moment. I found comfort in knowing that if she didn’t make it, I would have the opportunity to raise her after this life.
Eventually, I was taken upstairs to see her. Her dad was with her. He put his arm around me and I reached into the clear little box and touched her hand. She was covered in tape and wires. Her eyes were shut and she wasn’t moving. Ten seconds passed – maybe – and a helicopter team came rushing in, with all the technical talk again. I asked what was going on. Someone held a paper in front of me with a diagram of a heart on it and started to explain what was wrong with hers. They said she was being taken to Phoenix Children’s Hospital.
I wasn’t listening. I just watched them as they lifted her tiny body into another box and took off running. Her protective daddy asked if he could go with her and they said no, he would have to follow by car. He kissed me and off he went, along with his dad, to be with our new baby girl.
At Phoenix Children’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), her concerned father was told Cloey had a coarctation of the aorta. She was on a breathing machine and was scheduled to have a surgery the next morning. The doctors showed him the x-ray that showed a hole in her heart. Acting on faith, Cloey was given a blessing by her dad and his grandfather. He had never given a blessing before, and had only been ordained an Elder (received the power and authority to give such a blessing) a few months before. I was not there, but was later told by a nurse it was a very powerful experience. She said several nurses paused during the blessing – unheard of in the NICU. The words of the blessing were more than an new dad with a heavy heart could have uttered on his own. They had to have come from a loving Father in Heaven who was mindful of the new challenges our family was facing.
Cloey was born on March 25, 2001 at 3:13 p.m. at Desert Samaritan Hospital in Mesa, Arizona. Within hours, both she and her daddy had left the hospital. Very early that next morning – before the sun came up, I called my husband. I was crying – lonely, and unsure of what was happening with my new baby – so he came back to be with me for a short time. By 10:30 a.m. on March 26, I had checked out of Desert Samaritan Hospital and was on my way to Phoenix Children’s Hospital to see Cloey. When I arrived, she was the biggest baby there and was right by the window. For that I was thankful.
Sometime that day, they ran another echocardiogram of her heart before taking her to surgery. The hole that was there the day before was gone. Cloey would not need the surgery! It was a real life miracle. The only thing that had been done to Cloey between the x-ray with the hole and the one without, was the blessing she had been gien. I knew then that the Lord truly does answer prayers, and that the power of the priesthood is real.
Cloey spent the next 14 days in the NICU. We were right by her side every day, and would stay until 1 or 2 a.m. We would go home briefly, eat and sleep, and return by 7 a.m. each morning. We read to her, played musical toys for her, talked to her and dressed her in her own clothes.
At one point, when they were trying to wean her off the breathing machine, she crashed. Alarms went off and they told us to step back. We thought we were going to lose her. Three days later when she was successfully breathing on her own, one of the doctors told us, “She is the master of her own destiny.”
Around this time, the geneticist pulled us into a room off of the NICU to give us the results of some blood tests they had taken. We thought this was just procedure. We later learned the blood tests were ordered because of her “dysmorphic features”.
The geneticist asked us to sit down. We held hands. He told us Cloey had an unbalanced translocation duplication 16q22 monosomy 14q32, to be exact. He wasn’t sure what to classify it as because he had never seen it before. But he was sure she would be severely physically and mentally delayed. He told us that it would be significant. She may never walk or talk or even know who we were. We both cried.
Until that moment we thought that this NICU stay would be our trial. As soon as she was better we would go home and this would all become a distant memory. We really had no idea something was “wrong” with her. All our hopes and dreams were gone for her at that second. Then he said, “You can take your baby home, and I will see you in six months.”
We went out into the hall and told my grandmother what the doctor had told us, and we all cried again. Then we went back into the NICU. As soon as I saw her again I stopped grieving for what she wasn’t and started loving what she was. She was so beautiful and was fighting so hard. She had no idea what we had just heard or that she had limits. She was just trying to be a baby. So we took her home and knew we would do all we could for her.