A new year

I know I'm not the only person who goes into a new year with goals that I set to accomplish. I've been spending a lot of time lately reflecting on who I want to be. I want to be the best wife, best mother, best friend, best person I can be. Getting there isn't going to be easy.

Justin and I had started talking about our New Years Resolutions, and we had already started to talk about the amount of growth we saw lately from Nora Grace. She is developing in ways we never could have dreamed. But we also started to realize that while we get upset with people for treating Nora differently because she's disabled, we ourselves have done the same. We started to talk about how important it is to make sure that we are not constantly focusing on just keeping Nora alive. She needs to thrive. A lot of times we will read to Nora when Lydia is present, but she very rarely gets read to alone. We read to Lydia every night before she goes to bed. It's not fair that Nora doesn't get the same 1 on 1 time.

Having just made those conclusions, we were forced to face this reality head on last night. Since Nora has been doing so well, we have taken for granted how fragile she is and how one infection, one plug, could take her from us forever. Yesterday Nora started running a fever and coughing. Influenza and RSV are going around like crazy right now. We decided she needed to be evaluated locally. At first I called her PCP's office, who said that they had no openings but would get ahold of his nurse. The nurse called me and said that she could get her in that afternoon, but in a town 45 minutes away. As her PCP knows her better than most of the doctors in town, and the forecast wasn't supposed to be too bad, we opted to go. The trip there wasn't bad. The trip back, however, was awful.

Nora's oximeter started alarming that her saturations were below 90%. She would go down below 90 and then stabilize. I looked at her, and she seemed OK so we kept driving. The road conditions were awful. Eventually, Nora's sats kept dropping and did not resolve. I unbuckled my car seat and rushed back there to find her blue and struggling to breathe. I told Justin we needed to pull over. Things got worse when I got her out of the car seat, her sats dropped to the mid 70's. I yelled at him to call 911 and get the oxygen and the ambu bag so that we could get her sats back up. She had a ton of secretions that were building up. I took out several suction catheters and was suctioning a ton. The police arrived and said that the ambulance was on the way. I kept working on her and was able to get her to breathe a little better.

Once the ambulance came, we stabilized her and changed her trach. The trach she had in must have had a faulty balloon because there was not much sterile water in it. Changing the trach seemed to make things better and she had better color though she was very pale. We decided to have her transported to the Fairmont ER where they did a chest x-ray. They did decide that they thought she has a pneumonia on her right lung. We were sent home on antibiotics.

When Lydia is sick, she often will end up in bed with us. Since Nora has had her trach, she has been able to do that once. It is not fair to her. When she's sick she just wants her mama.

I thought long and hard about it and asked myself, "If we would have lost Nora today, would I have had regrets?" The answer was without question, yes.

Nora seemed very tired when we came home. She went to bed and then about 11:30 PM she was wide awake. She wasn't crying, but I could tell she just wanted to snuggle. So Justin and I moved her to our room. Nora and I watched TV, snuggled and fell asleep together. We slept in and I was so incredibly thankful for the closeness. We both needed it so much after the scare we had last night.

Today, Nora has two doses of her antibiotic in her system and is doing well. She's still very tired but we are so thankful we have the tools to have saved her life more than once. We are grateful to God for once again sparing her life. We are grateful for EMS, the ER, and our PCP as well as our team in Sioux Falls who are helping us to give Nora the very best life she can have.

There are so many other goals I have for 2020, but today I am focusing on loving my family and making sure that they are first and foremost, second only to God.

I pray that 2020 is a year of more blessings, more love, more memories, and more lessons. I have so much more to say but right now, I am going to leave it at that. One more thing I will leave you with, please love your kiddos a little extra. They are only little once, and you just never know how long God will bless you with them. Our children are not ours, but His that He loans to us.