One year ago, it all started...

We had a very quiet Thanksgiving this last weekend.  It was very welcoming to us.  Spending some time with my family in Colorado at my sister's place and enjoying our time being normal. We're glad to have had a quiet, boring, uneventful holiday this year. Last year, however, it was quite the time. As I said before, we think this has to do with a lot of what happened with Q's rough year from the previous post. In order to tell our whole story of last year, this part of the story has to be included. It's how we spent last year at Thanksgiving, so you can see why we were happy to have a nice quiet time with family.

Last year, my wife Erin and I were expecting our 3rd child, we were going to move into a brand new home, and we thought the year would end great. That wasn't the case. At Thanksgiving time, as we were planning an enjoyable holiday with Erin's family, she came home on Wednesday complaining of stomach/back pain. We didn't really think much of it because she was 31 weeks pregnant and we were going to her parents, so she had ample time to rest.

On the way to Baudette (4 hours away by car), Erin didn't feel very good. She threw up a few times and just didn't have an appetite or anything. It was just stomach flu, right? As the weekend went on though, she became completely uncomfortable and still wasn't feeling good. Friday morning, she woke me up and said we need to go to the ER.

Off to the ER we went. The doctor and nurses got Erin back to comfortable, thanks to morphine and getting fluids in her. Considering we were far away from home and in a very rural area, the Doctor has to be prepared to take on whatever. Trying to find some humor in the situation, it was pretty funny watching the nurses trying to figure out how to hook up the baby monitor since they didn't deliver babies there for a few years.

After doing some tests, the doctor first thought it was a UTI.  After a few more test results came back, then the doctor thought it could be Erin's gall bladder. The issue though with being in a rural area for a holiday weekend is a limited hospital staff so the ultrasound tech for the area was not there. After consulting with the doctor, we were off to Bemidji to the nearest larger hospital with an OB, an ultrasound tech, and most importantly a surgeon if needed.

After waiting a little while, we loaded up the ambulance and headed to Bemidji. Thankfully the kids were with Grandma and Grandpa, Aunts, Uncles, and cousins to keep them entertained while we headed two hours away.  Once we got to Bemidji to the hospital, we were wheeled up to the Birthing Center.  It started to hit me how serious this was.  I wasn't sure if we'd have a baby but I wanted to make sure that first, my wife got better, and second, baby was safe, sound, and stayed in the womb. When we got into the room, the OB doc started checking Erin.  Where the pain was getting described, there were lots of questions about if it was really her gall bladder.  The attending nurse then said, I bet it's her appendix.  The doc summoned the general surgeon on call to the room to get his opinion.

The surgeon came into the room and he also thought there was potential for Erin's appendix having issues.  With Erin being pregnant though, X-rays and MRIs were not possible.  They couldn't expose baby to radiation.  Also, being the gallbladder was a possibility, they wanted to do the ultrasound. The ultrasound tech took a look at Erin's organs and found her gallbladder was good to go and healthy.  She also looked at baby, and thankfully, baby was still doing great.  Now what do we do? Our surgeon put it out there and said they weren't sure it was her appendix but they could do the surgery and remove her appendix, no matter what.  Or, we could stay on antibiotics for another 12 hours and see how she responds.  The issue though was Erin's body was fighting hard.  Her White Blood Cell count had raised a little bit from Baudette to Bemidji. Granted, that could have been resulting from many different factors, but it was concerning for sure.

After some consideration, we decided for Erin to have the surgery.  It was the best choice to get moving now.  There were many risks though, especially with baby.  However, I felt we were in great hands for a very tricky situation.  At 8:30 pm on a Black Friday, we were headed to the operating room and I was going to wear out the carpet in the waiting room pacing around.  After an hour and a half, the doctor came out and told me it was the appendix.  The worst part though was it was a burst appendix!  The doc said it was 2/3rds dead so Erin probably had a burst appendix for a while.  It made quite the mess, but they got it cleaned out as well as they could and were going to have Erin in the hospital to monitor baby and to monitor her for infection.  The next 24-48 hours were very critical to make sure baby stayed in, otherwise, we were going to have a helicopter ride to Fargo to NICU.

Long story short, the rest of the weekend was uneventful thankfully.  Baby stayed in the womb, Erin got better each and every day, and we were able to go home after 6 days in the Bemidji hospital. Getting home was a little interesting as a good ol' snow storm was coming into the area, but nothing was going to stop us from getting home.  We made it home and were going to get ready to take on the next challenge of moving to our new house.

After we experienced last year, it was nice to enjoy some time with family, eating a full Thanksgiving meal, and just enjoying each other's company.  We didn't have to run to a hospital or deal with the anxiety of what we experienced.  It was nice to have a quiet, relaxing holiday.

Getting Back to Normal

Normal.  It's what everyone wants their life to be.  It's something as we go through the ebbs and flows of life that each of us enjoy.  As human beings, we don't typically like getting off the track of "normal".

Our life had a large hiccup from normal this past year.  It's why I decided to start writing this blog. I want to get our message out there.  Granted, I'll eventually someday write about what we call normal things in our life, but I want to help families who may get derailed from normalcy like we did this past year.

For those of you who don't know us, I am the only male in our family of 5.  My wife Erin is a "super mom" who is a person who I admire a ton with her passion for her family and close friends, her work, and things like shoes.  My oldest daughter, A, is a 1st grader who makes me proud of the things she does quite often.  My middle girl, E, has a spunky attitude but makes me laugh some how everyday. Q, our youngest put us through a lot this year.  With each of these girls, we love them very much and we'd do anything to make sure they are safe and sound but also have fun in life.  We try hard to make life as normal as can be.

What took us away from "normal"?  Well, we had to deal with quite a few things since Thanksgiving weekend of 2013.  This is a very long story of not being normal that I want to spend the time to put our story out there.  This entry is going to be a high level story of what happened. I'm going to dig into each part of our story in future entries.  

2013 started out to be an exciting year.  We made the decision to build a house as well as expand our family.  Lots to look forward to, right?  It was until our Thanksgiving holiday.  

It seemed as if we dealt with the world coming out to get us.  My wife had an appendectomy, while being 31 weeks pregnant with Q.  A week after being in the hospital for 6 days, we got to move into our new house.  Then, after only being in the house for a week, Erin's water broke and Q introduced herself to us 6 weeks early.  10 more days were spent in the hospital.  Needless to say, it wasn't a normal holiday season.

Happy to have a healthy family to start 2014.

We had a pretty normal start to 2014.  New baby at home, work was going good, and things seemed to be status quo for us.  May 5th, 2014 our lives were put completely out of normal again. Q came home from daycare lethargic and not herself.  As parents, we had no idea what was going on. Something just wasn't right with Q.  She had a tough start to life and we just were afraid for her. After Erin made a trip to ER, they couldn't find anything wrong until Q got a CT scan.  It was a moment we wish no parent has to ever go through.  Q had a subdural hematoma, a bleed in her brain.  Then the questions of whether or not someone had shaken our baby started to come at us.  It was our worst nightmare.

The next few days were quite challenging.  We found out Q had hemorrhaged retinas in addition to her brain bleed.  Then she had surgery to relieve the pressure in her head.  With the injuries that she had, not only did we need to worry about our 4 month old infant, but we as concerned parents had to deal with an investigation on us as parents of Q.  The only caregivers in Q's life were us (Mom and Dad) and our daycare provider of 6 + years who took care of our other 2 kids. There was no way that anyone shook Q.  This just did not seem real to us.  It definitely was not normal.

Before we left the hospital, Erin and I had dealt with a couple of different interviews individually with police and our county social services folks.  Our life continued to get peeled back and exposed with more people than we ever wanted to share it with, but we had to in order to find the truth that we never harmed our child.  We ended up getting a lawyer to help us out through this. Not only were we going to worry about a hospital bill, but now we had legal bills to think about. 

After 10 days in the hospital, the doctor said Q could go home.  However, Social Services asked for us to bring as many family and friends to a meeting to make sure we could go home. Thankfully, we had family, friends, and co-workers show up and they ended up becoming our help to allow us to take Q home.  As parents, we wanted to do whatever it took to have our family at home, however, we had to deal with rules in order to show Social Services they could trust us. It was ridiculous because we never did anything to our kid.  It seemed as if the system would ever allow us to trust us with our own kid.

We ended up seeking a 2nd opinion with a pediatric neurologist at Gillette Children's hospital in St. Paul because we wanted answers to show it was medical and not trauma.  Also, we had the chance that Q needed additional surgeries because of her head injury.  Thankfully, the doctors there didn't want to do surgery and ended up discovering an answer to our prayers.  Q had a condition.  We didn't realize it could cause anything until we started talking to some lawyers who had knowledge of the fallacy of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).

Social Services however, didn't believe us. They ruled maltreatment occurred, but they couldn't determine who did it.  Additionally, this would be on our record for the next 10 years.  We had to continue to fight them so we could get back to normal.  Since Q was in the hospital, we had purchased cameras to record our daily lives, had my parents live with us, and have friends and family check in on us to report to Social Services we were fit as parents and wouldn't harm Q. Never did I ever imagine that we would have to prove that we were good parents. We hired a different lawyer who had knowledge of the system in the state of MN. She helped us put together our appeal, while we continued our "ongoing child protection".  

Continued visits to doctors showed progress with Q and in September, her brain scan showed no sign of additional fluid or brain injury.  It was great news knowing that Q's head was now ok.  She continues to hit her milestones.

Meanwhile, we still had to endure another 3 months of being under Social Services.  After some pushing, we finally ended up getting our initial doctor to agree with the 2nd opinion that he couldn't specifically state what caused Q's injury. Because of this, Social Services overturned their maltreatment ruling and we were free to parent our kids again. It was 6 very trying months, but we are stronger because of it.

As I said, this is a high level story of what went on.  I want to possibly help someone in the future to let them know that you aren't alone and there are people available to help you get the truth. Future posts will be more of each part of our story and perhaps some fun posts, too.

Slowly, we are getting back to normal and I can't wait to have a quiet holiday season this year.