Our Story

Aug 4th 2011 we woke up and headed to the hospital ready to meet our son. We have a awesome 3yr old, Owen, so we'd done this before and were just ready to get through the induction and have Mile's. After about 7 1/2 hours of pitocin, a epidural, and a lot of fluid (the dr. had broke my water slowly because he knew from the sonograms that I had a lot!) Mile's decided at about 3:30 he was ready to make his appearance. The final stage of labor was quick and by 3:42 we got our first glimpse of our beautiful little boy, and heard the sweetest little soft cry-thats when things sarted to go wrong.
The instant the cord was cut he started having breathing problems....the nurses quickly realized it was bad and rushed him out of the room hollering "code blue" and to call peds. The next hour was complete torture as a parent, J.W. and I were left sitting waiting on updates as the staff closed down the nursery and worked on Miles. The peds Dr. came in and told us they would try to fly him to cooks and explained that the x-rays had shown a condition called cdh and what had happened. I was so panicked but hopeful that if we could make it to Cook's they could fix our baby and our family would be o.k..
A few minutes later the dr. came in again to tell us that Mile's had been fighting and his heart was having to overcompensate so much that it gave out, and although CPR was underway the loss of oxygen would have serious permenant effects and we needed to make a decision.As a parent I can tell you the hardest decision you can ever be faced with is to have to love your child enough to tell someone to let them go.....I'm not even sure how I got my voice to make enough sound to get the words out. We never even got the chance to hold him while he was with us, all we had was a few wonderful seconds that we will alway hold in our hearts.

The next days were a blur and all I wanted to do was lay in bed and shut the world out....I kept thinking if I slept I'd wake up and my baby would be in his nursery and the world would be right again-it would all be a horrible dream. Being a Christian the only thing I felt I could do was to lean on my beliefs and my faith even though I didn't feel much like God had been by our sides-I have always been a firm believer that God has a reason for everything, so I clung to that notion as empty as it felt at the time. The church and our community showed such support, we were thankful for all of the love we recieved.Its been two weeks now and I have spent so much time researching CDH and talking to others that know or have been through a child having CDH. Our biggest questions are why, how,will it happen again, and what do we do from here?
I decided to blog our experience in hope that as we go on we can possibly help someone else who's had the same experience.Every bit of information we can help get out is knowledge and hope that tommorow will be better for another baby or family dealing with CDH....