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Music Playing: Butterfly Kisses |
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Angels, Butterflies and Michigan J Frog |
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Kayleigh's Story |
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Click the picture to e-mail my Mommy |
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Kayleigh Virginia Martin was born December 4th, 1996, after my husband and I had been married for two years and suffered the miscarriage of our first child. Kayleigh weighed 7 pounds and 4 1/2 ounces, and she was 20 inches long. She was perfect in every way we could see. Her APGARs were 8 and 9. Everything looked normal, but it didn't stay that way. She was born with a broken heart, and in time, she would break mine. |
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Kayleigh's heart was about as defective as one could get and still support life. She had a defect called Tetralogy of Fallot, and Pulmonary Atresia, which meant, two holes in her heart, and an aorta that was misplaced over the holes so as to circulate unoxygenated blood along with the oxygenated blood causing her blood oxygen saturation levels to be way too low. Her lack of pulmonary arteries and a pulmonary valve meant she would have open heart surgery in her first week of life. |
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So, I checked myself out of the hospital less than 24 hours after a C-section delivery, and headed over to the Children's Hospital where they had taken my little girl for a heart catheterization procedure. She looked like any other baby except for all the tubes and wires that were keeping her alive. When they wheeled me in, I surprised them all by identifying where she was by her cry, which I had never heard before. It just proves that mothers know. |
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They told us after her heart cath that she would need to go to Ann Arbor Michigan to the Children's Hospital at U of M. There they would open up her heart and put in a pulmonary valve and try to help her pulmonary arteries grow so she could have the full repair when she was a little older. The shock is unimaginable. There is nothing like being handed a diagnosis like this when you expected a perfectly healthy baby. The innocence is lost forever. |
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She did well after her first surgery, and I made my way around the giant U of M campus in a wheelchair, when I could be persuaded to leave her side. She was home for Christmas that year, and I am eternally grateful to the friends who captured her on video for us. She was so tiny and fragile, and so beautiful. I knew from the first that she wasn't meant to stay, but I had hope. She ended up back in the local Children's hospital on December 29th with two severe infections which are usually found in Premature babies. NEC, necrotizing enterocolitis; and RSV respiratory Synctial virus. Either one of them could have been fatal to her, but what actually ended up happening was that she got the attention of the gastroenterologist who helped her to be able to spend five months at home with us laughing playing and being a regular baby. I 'll never forget Dr. Preud'homme and all he did for my little girl. |
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