Shortly after Thanksgiving, our 2.5 week old newborn daughter (born 11/13/24), came down with a cold. She was struggling to breathe and had moments where she stopped, so we called for an ambulance. They arrived, assessed and transported her to our local hospital where she was diagnosed with RSV.
Over the days that followed, our sweet Sarah Grace, got progressively worse. On day 3, she was ventilated. Not too long after, she developed holes in her lungs, which caused them to collapse. In total, she had 4 chest tubes put in to try to evacuate this air outside of her lungs. By day 12, they were instructing us that she needed to be transported to Children’s Minneapolis for further care – but, they didn’t think she would make it there.
We rallied our tremendous group of prayer warriors – and by the grace of God, she made it there.
When she arrived, they quickly placed her on ECMO (lung bypass, life support) to let her lungs rest. Her first few days were rough. She continued to develop holes in the lungs anytime they would try to reduce life support. So they put her on complete lung rest, fully sedated and paralyzed to allow her lungs to heal.
We heard often that she wouldn’t survive without life support for more than a minute or two. During her period of lung rest, her life support machine went down – and, God breathed life in her lungs and kept her alive for the hour it took to get a new machine up and going.
Miracle upon miracle – and after 53 days, she was removed from life support. She’s still at Children’s, still on a ventilator, but improving. All thanks to God.
During my darkest moments, I turned to KTIS as a source of hope and light. On one of my drives home from the hospital, a well-timed “Don’t Stop Praying” by Matthew West came on. We’ve held on to hope and never stopped praying throughout this journey. Thank you for being a place that I could turn to when I needed strength.