mtfparent-blog

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We have collected hospital bracelet's like its a new trend!

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You never know how good you got it until your stuck in a sterile jungle with nothing but a window view

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First Extended Stay

Well our first “Extended Stay” was a very stressful one and crazy to say the least! I'm that type of Mom who always does something for the kids on holidays no matter how small the holiday is and St.Patrick’s day is no different, well this year it happened to fall on a Friday so we had our traditional green mickey mouse pancakes and eggs and all the kids were dressed in their St. Patrick’s day outfits so we could go the parade but apparently Carter had other ideas. He wasn't exactly fussy just really hot and kind of acting loopy as the morning went on so I took his temp(rectal due to age) and it was 102 which isn't uncommon in babies but due to his size I knew it wasn't good. I put ice under his arms to help bring it down as well as Tylenol but it just kept going on up so I made the decision to take him to the emergency room and it was in those moments that our life’s had began to change forever! 

The doctor came in and saw him, checked his vitals and made his decision to do some further testing. At that moment I called my husband and told him what was going on and with in 15 minutes he was at his bed side and I was making arrangements for my amazing Father In-law to come stay with the older boys while we focused on Carter until my Mom could get up here to keep the boys because Christopher had school still. It was one of many scary moments to happen with Carter to date.

 So back at the hospital the doctors did their usual blood work and because he was uncircumcised that they needed to do a urine cultural and a few x-rays because his chest sounded a bit raspy. They did the urine cultural and because they bagged him it came back with some growth, bagging him meant they put a urine cultural bag over his penis for him to pee into but because he wasn't circumcised we figured it would come back with some growth but we weren't expecting all the other things that he had going on as well. 

Carter was admitted and transfered via ambulance to Martin Memorial North Hospital in Stuart with aspiration pneumonia of his right lower lobe, UTI with multiple growths and a ear infection of his left ear. To say we were heartbroken or devasted  was a understatement it was one of many hard and gut wrenching moments with him to come. He had a very amazing doctor name Dr. Su and some of the most amazing nurses we have ever encountered, we consider the doctor and the nurses more like family now. He struggled for 3 days to break the fever, it never went below 101 and it was scary because the longer a fever stays that high in a infant his size the more chance it has to do damage not only to his body but his brain as well. Finally after day 3 he broke the fever and with the medication which is no walk in the park meds he was cleared to go home on day 5. His medications were “ ceftriaxone 25mg intravenous and clindamycin 10mg intravenous which his UTI growths and pneumonia were sensitive to, thank god for small miracles! So on March 21 we were released to go home and was hopeful it would our first, last and only trip to the Hospital ever but boy were we wrong little did we know it was just the start of a very long road for him and us as a family!!!!

Well until tomorrows blog, good day everyone and kiss those babies a little more often as you never know when things may change!

[mtfparent-blog]

Welcome Everyone

Hey everybody,

  So this is going to be my new blog site. The other site was all to confusing for me to use and I was honestly getting to darn mad at it lol, I'm really not good with technology and it shows. So lets hope I can navigate this site better and their is the added bonus of not having to subscribe to this one. So Id like to thank my big brother for his technical support in setting this up for me and helping me when I call him crying because I'm beyond frustrated, so thank you from the bottom of my heart Bubba!!!!! #bestbrotherever#

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Here is copy of the flyer for my organization, Mighty Tiny Fighter (MTF)

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His Arrival

Hey guys,

So today I’m writing about his grand and very stubborn entrance into the world. I’m not even sure where to start with this story lol. Carter had no desire to come into this world just like his brother Jamison got to a” Webb” thing I swear. I went to my weekly check up and had made yet again no progress much like his older brother. So the doctor decided to do yet again another ultrasound to see what was going on. I’m laying there as the tech is doing all her measurements and I’m watching my little guy rolling around and trying to get comfy which at that point was a little hard. The doctor came back in and decided that Carter needed to make his entrance since Id made not progress I was going to be induced and let me tell you how bad that sucks! there is nothing worse than Pitocin and that cervidil cord that they put get everything soft, oh the joys of being pregnant and labor. All modesty goes out the window when you’re having a baby that’s for sure. SO anyways I was to be induced January 1st, my check in time was 6pm so they could get everything going before midnight. Like my last induction Mike and I were stuffing our faces with taco bell on the way to the hospital because as pregnant women know once you’re in the hospital and they get everything set up and going its no more eating until you have the baby, thank the lord my labors are fairly quick and not days like I’ve heard some women’s to be. Nothing really got going until the morning. We were hoping to have him the afternoon like his big brothers but he was an evening baby. I was pretty out of it for most the day do to the amazing drugs I was given, I remember doing a lot of sleeping and small talk with my sister Amanda and hubby Mike but other than that I don’t remember much until it was time to push and apparently I wasn’t allowed to push because my OB wasn’t there yet but from what everyone said I did good holding that baby in until he got their hahaha.

When it was time to push Carter came pretty easily but man I wasn’t prepared for the size he was at all. I had given birth to a 5lbs 12oz midget on January 2nd and he was amazing but I remember saying to the doctor “What am I suppose to do with him,he is so small. How will I cut his nails?” it was all so new to me to have something so tiny laying on me and looking at me with those amazing eyes of his. He was breath-taking and so perfect. But just after he was born is when our real first struggle began. Do to his very small size he wasn’t able to latch on without suffocating and as women who give birth your breast get larger for obvious reasons lets say he was smaller than said breast It was crazy! But I also knew from having Jamison my thyroid wouldn’t let me produce so much so I had a bottle on stand by but the hospital we had him at was all Pro Breastfeeding and downed the bottle and refused at first to give it to him because then he wouldn’t want to nurse,so that left me feeling ashamed again and him starving and being so little he couldn’t afford to go hungry so after my amazing husband yelled and ranted(thank god for him) he was given a bottle but with a preemie nipple and he still struggled to latch onto that because his mouth was so insanely small. One nurse came in and gave him a pacifier so he could suck on that and strengthen his jaw muscles due to the fact of his size it was very weak. And so that was our first of many problems to come.

We brought him home after the standard 3 days and he was released with a clean bill of health just classified at tiny borderline preemie due to his birth weight and when we took him home he was 5lbs. 5oz. so he looked even smaller. Mike and I were totally prepared for a “normal” size baby of 7 lbs or more due to his siblings weights so we had everything 0-3 month clothes, size 1 diapers, the pacifier with the animals on them and everything but guess what? not a blessed thing fit him and the binkis were like hub caps and the animals were bigger then he was it was nuts, so back to stores went and exchanged all the diapers for premie size diapers and bought about 10 new different types of pacifiers and not a one worked due to the fact they all gagged him because of his tiny mouth so he would for a few seconds and release it and do that inbetween feedings, He was such a fighter right from the start.

Sorry this entry was very delayed. I’ve been learning as I go like I said in my last blog that and my internet has been crazy. So I will make sure that they post everyday no matter what. Please remember to subscribe to this blog and donate at my go fund me page. I have lots of things in the works so be on the look out!

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The Start

Hey everyone,

So yesterday was my first blog and it was a little rough, as many of you know I’m a very old-fashioned kind of girl who actually has a paper day planner and an old school phone book so this blogging thing and use of a computer is extremely knew so bear with me while I navigate this and learn as I go. So the purpose for this blog is to get the word out about my organization and what its purpose is but in order to do that the next few blog entries will be about our struggles that lead us up to starting this organization. So over the next week or so you will get a chance to actually hear the true hardships of what we went through with him. So here is the first of many post about our true struggles that weren’t aired on face book in their entirety.

The struggles with Carter pretty much started right from conception. My first trimester was pretty easy just the usual morning sickness and then nothing it wasn’t until the 2nd trimester that the real struggles started with Carter, even right in the womb he was a handful. I went to my monthly appointment and did my required blood work, but I’ve never received a call saying the doctor needs to see you before my next monthly check up, so Mike and I had just thought it was just going to be about my thyroid levels as to seeing I have a thyroid disease called “Hashimoto”, so for us it wasn’t a big deal so i went alone. I go the next day to see the doctor and it starts with an ultrasound which many women know you never get a spur of the moment ultrasound unless there is some unexpected trouble so I was extremely nervous going into this ultrasound. The tech did her job and took measurements and everything was looking “okay” man do I hate that damn word!!!! The OB walks in and just instantly starts going into my blood work results and how I’ve showed signs of being a carrier for a rare genetic defect called “Trisomy 18” while he is explaining this to me I’m getting nervous of course , he then goes into I’ve got two options I can either have another set of labs done and wait for those results or I can do a amnio asap but with doing that I run an extremely high risk of losing the baby which was not an option. So once he spoke to my husband and we decided to do further blood work the doctor launched into what my outcomes could be.     

     My first outcome was “Termination” like my baby was a bug, so hell no that wasn’t even close to being one so my next was what I like to call the scare tactic if I was to carry to term and that was a big if I could die during delivery leaving my sons mother less and husband a widow which I didn’t want to happen but if it meant bringing this amazing little miracle into the world then so be it so needless to say my mind was already made up. It wasn’t an easy decision to make but I knew my sons and husband would have more support and love then if I was alive so that helped ease that burden. But then it was if I lived through the delivery and so did the baby what was his life going to be like? Well it was explained to me exactly like this. He would be in a serious amount of pain constantly and it would be a slow and painful existence until he couldn’t fight anymore and died, well hell either way I looked at it I was totally up the creek with out a paddle so my decision to carry to term was still going to happen no matter the outcome. It was time I turned my relationship with the man upstairs around and started doing a whole lot more talking and praying then griping and complaining. With my decision made the OB decided to send us to see a specialist who deals with extreme high risk pregnancies and babies while their still in the womb. So it was a hurry up and schedule the appointment and wait like every other doctors office.

     Well, we waited about 5 days before we had an appointment and it was such a huge relief to finally get some definitive answers about was going to happen . It was so hard sitting in the doctor’s office with him right across from us slowly reading over all the OB’s notes with a bunch of head nods and okay’s {see why I hate the okay word?}. Once he was finished looking over the notes he did his usual exam and came to the conclusion that based on what he read and the exam it didn’t seem like I had the Trisomy gene but he still had to redo the labs and do a more invasive ultrasound which lasted about an hour or so and it was then he determined that I did not have the trisomy defect but he would know for sure once the labs came back. So we left that appointment feeling a ton better but still not out of the woods yet. It was about a week later we went back to see him and were officially told that my labs came back negative and it must have been a false reading so that was huge. This was hurdle one of about 30 or so it seems.

     Finally, what we didn’t realize was this was just the start of our very scary and constant battle to keep our miracle alive and going. Its been a constant battle to keep him healthy and the germs at bay. Fighting things you can’t see with the naked eye is not easy but its our life. So our story continues.

Well friends, until tomorrows blog good night and again we appreciate your love and support.

#MightyTinyFighter#

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Mighty Tiny Fighter

Hi Everyone,      My name is Elizabeth, I’m a mother to 3 amazing boys whom are my world aside from my husband. I’ve started this blog and organization for all the parents of children who are or have been hospitalized. This organization and blog I’ve started are very near and dear to my heart as to seeing I’ve spent more time at the hospital for extended stays then home and just as much at doctors offices then home with my husband and kids. I feel I have better relationships with my car and my youngest sons doctors then my own husband,kids and house. As a parent you are constantly faced with new battles and challenges.      My organization is for parents of children who have been hospitalized for either a few days or as we call them extended stays, we’ve done both of those. As a parent, when our children get sick, which usually happens in the early evening hours or middle of the night, we aren’t thinking “well let me pack a bag of clothes and all my essentials just in case my son or daughter end up being admitted.” Well that’s were my  #MTF# Parents Support Organization comes in to play. I know from first hand experience, on multiple occasions, that having a simple toothbrush and toothpaste to brush my teeth after a long night of sitting in the ER, and then my child’s room, could have gone along way. Having those helped me feel a lot better because lets face it, the doctors and nurses are in your faces trying to wake you up so they can speak to you about your child’s care plan for the day, new meds or the nurse shift change and who wants to talk to someone who has nasty dragon breath, right? My goal is to get Parent Care Packages on the Peds floor for all parents of children who have been admitted so you have some semblance or normalcy in a very hard time. My care packages will consist of the following: Toothbrush,Toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, conditioner(all travel size), disposable razor and a little notebook with a pen. All these items can be purchased at your local dollar store, including a box of gallon bags. These items will be placed in gallon size zip lock bag and available at the nurses stations. The gallon size bags are so if a parent is in a rush to get out of there, like I have on more then one occasion, its not a issue throwing them in wet and all into the bag. Or, if they choose to toss them on the way out its not expensive as a traditional cloth bag. The bags will also consist of some info about my organization with a link to this blog and a go fund me page in the event anyone wants to give back and a phone number if they’d like to give a personal donation. I have figured out each bag to be around $6-$8 per bag. Also, if your a local business and want to sponsor a few care packs I would add a business card of yours to each package you’ve donated and state within the literature about my organization that your company sponsored those particular bags. My first hospital is going to be Palms West Hospital in Loxahatchee, I’ve already been in contact with the child social worker on the peds floor and now I’m just waiting for the call back. The first set of care packs are going to be there in September. So until tomorrows post, goodnight and thank you for you for support and continued love for #MightyTinyFighter#