This is us

This is where it all began…

Our family, like any other, was striving for the “American Dream”. We had a beautiful house, I made enough money to support my family and Rachel could be a stay at home mom. It was everything we had ever wanted.

We had our first born during COVID19 which came with all kinds of its own frustrations, but nothing in comparison to what we were about to face…

We first learned about Amadea’s condition during the anatomy scan around 20 weeks. For this scan, the ultrasound tech didn’t say much other than “I can’t get clear images of the head”. From there, Rachel was rebooked with a different medical imaging site. For this scan, they revealed that Amadea had something going on. At the time, their response was simply “she is very unlikely to survive birth. We can’t guarantee, but if we could, we would”. We immediately left, completely devastated by the news. We prayed about it and we felt peace about Amadea. We knew she was going to be alright. We continued on as usual.

Rachel told her midwife that she didn’t want this pregnancy to be treated any differently. This didn’t really work as it was frequently brought up throughout. The worst of it was when she received info on donating tissue from stillborn right on her due date!! It was truly unbelievable.

Now the day had finally come. Amadea was on her way. She was born October 13 at 3:21am. We don’t have a birth weight for her unfortunately. Red Deer hospital handled the entire situation about as poorly as they could have. People were constantly trying to tell us how she would never thrive, how she would never be able to eat on her own among many other issues. We were sent home after 14 hours of admission. We pushed to be discharged due to being treated poorly. We returned home and continued life as we wanted. Amadea thrived, feeding on her own, playing and sleeping as any newborn would.

Unfortunately, our first real challenge was coming up as Amadea neared one month of age…