Steve With Our Three Little Boys
From Left: Jordan, Jared & Joel
Love at Home
There is beauty all around
When there's love at home;
There is joy in every sound
When there's love at home.
Peace and plenty here abide,
Smiling sweet on every side.
Time does softly, sweetly glide
When there's love at home.
Jared continued to grow and thrive, however, the residual affects of RSV left him with severe asthma. His breathing was so loud that if he was in one end of the house and I was in the other, I could hear his little chest heaving, crackling and wheezing. He developed a significant cough which led us back to his cardiologists. Steve and I were sure he had an infection brewing but his cardiologists refused to prescribe antibiotics for him. They told us that many of their heart patients developed a cough and that it was probably "normal" for Jared.
Our instincts told us differently and as Jared continued to cough and get worse, we were even more convinced that he had developed a respiratory infection. We ran Jared's symptoms by our friend, Dr. Hankel, who agreed to prescribe the necessary antibiotics. Jared's cough responded almost immediately and within a few days his cough diminished. We wondered how far the cardiologists would have let him go if we had not intervened.
Still, Jared was dealing with severe asthma. I gave him breathing treatments several times a day after which I would turn him on an angle upside down on his stomach, head facing my feet, and pound on his little lungs to loosen the phlegm.
When Jared was six months old, we left the security of Mott Children's Hospital in Michigan and their expertise to return back home to Maryland. It was a very hard decision for us. We were secure with our Michigan doctors and we wanted our son to receive the best of care. We also wanted him to have the opportunity to know his extended family and we were unsure as to whether or not he would live to see his first birthday.
We started investigating our options and were referred to Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, about one and a half hours drive from our home in Maryland. It just so happened that the world renown pediatric heart surgeon, Dr. Norwood, had just moved there from Boston Children's hospital and he was just the man that Jared was going to need to give him the best prognosis. Dr. Norwood had pioneered the "Norwood procedure" which saved many babies with heart deformities.
Moving day was fast approaching and Jared had one last appointment with his Michigan cardiologists. His blood oxygen reading was 37. He was blue in color and very fragile. We asked his doctor how was he able to live with such a low blood oxygen level and they responded, "We don't know, he just is." While waiting for the doctor to come in and give Jared his final Michigan examination, something funny happened. To this day, I can't remember what was so funny but I do remember that Steve and I were rolling in laughter. We could not stop laughing. Tears were streaming down our cheeks and we were scared to death the doctors would come in and think that the stress had finally turned us into lunatics! We laughed and laughed and laughed and then . . . we realized it was the first time since Jared's birth that we had laughed. It felt so good that it poured out of us like the Niagara Falls. We were healing.
The night before moving day, our church friends gave us a farewell in one of the members homes. We had never seen so many people packed into such a small space. The phone rang off the hook the entire evening with well wishers that could not make it to the farewell, and our good friends, Bob and Lauretta, had just had a new baby and stopped by on their way home from the hospital to wish us well. We were overwhelmed by the friendships we had made during our short stay Michigan.
Stay Tuned . . .
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