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.
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| 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.
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