Thief of Hearts

Hi friends!

I know I kinda left you hanging last time but to be honest, I got pretty emotional reliving that day. Writing all of this down for you all brings me right back to that time and place and I can literally feel as if I am there again; smells, sounds and feelings come crashing back. Now don’t get me wrong, it was a time of my life I wouldn’t change for anything in the world! It’s when I first became a mom. It’s also when God set a plan in motion that would impact not only our world but every single person we would come into contact with forever. So… let’s go back to that nursery window.

While everyone was anxiously waiting for our baby girl to make her debut at the well baby nursery, we were in the surgical suite having just delivered what we thought was a healthy baby girl. Remember, at this time we were 22 and 23 years old kids with no medical knowledge beyond what we had read and learned about in our prenatal classes. We heard a faint cry when Chelsea was born, but we obviously knew enough that something didn’t sound quite right. We saw several people dressed in scrubs quickly take our daughter and start working on her in the corner of the room as my doctor was suturing me up and the anesthesiologist was talking to me trying to keep me calm. They brought Chelsea over to me all wrapped up and quickly said that they were taking her to the NICU for ‘evaluation’. I immediately told my husband to follow them. The look of fear in his eyes is something I will never forget.

That one, quick glimpse of my sweet baby girl is all it took for me to fall hopelessly and completely in love with her. At that single moment, time stood still and I knew that I would gladly give my life for hers. The thought of her being alone in that NICU was unbearable so her father quickly ran after her as I went to recovery. I prayed the hardest I had ever prayed. I asked God to please just let her live. We were expecting a healthy baby; one that we could carry out to show our family and friends that were still waiting, with noses pressed up to the nursery window glass. Instead, they’d later have to scrub in, gown up, and eventually get to see her one at a time as long as she was stable, yet remained on a ventilator.

The next few days still seem like such a blur. She endured so much testing. We didn’t know from one hour to the next if she would make it or not. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. We had no answers. There were no indications that she wouldn’t be able to move or breathe on her own. All of her ultrasounds prior to birth showed no complications. Back then we recorded all of them on VHS tape so we could watch them over and over; yes we were a little obsessed with our lil girl and couldn’t wait to meet her in person! I am so glad we have those tapes because we eventually showed them to her geneticist and even he said he couldn’t explain how it could be that nothing showed up prior to birth. We would later learn, Chelsea had a rare form of Muscular Dystrophy, which is genetic! He literally told us that “she was meant to be”. This simply can’t be explained; it just had to be God’s plan.

I can tell you that God placed the perfect team of caregivers for our daughter with her the day she was born. All these years later, we still consider them family. Her doctors and nurses grew to love her from that very day and all the years of her life. Our family and friends prayed for her and for us so much that it was their prayers that literally carried us on days when we could not stand. There has been so much uncertainty throughout Chelsea’s life and there is so much more to this story that I’ll share, but still, one thing happened just as I knew it would… she stole the hearts of everyone there that day, waiting outside that nursery window!

Wendy