8 Year Heart-iversary

Today we celebrate 8 years since your heart was repaired.
You my child, are my biggest answer to prayer.

We prayed desperate prayers in those early hours of shock hearing that your heart was failing and that your prognosis was grim. We prayed for survival as you were life-flighted to Charleston and dozens of machines kept you alive.
God answered.

We prayed that the doctors would be able to repair your tiny, broken, strawberry-sized heart and that it would beat again on its own when they took you off heart/lung ECMO bypass. We prayed your heart would be strong enough to function in a way it wasn’t intended to in its transposed design.
God answered.

We prayed for circulation to your left leg when the shunt they’d had to put in caused so much swelling that they couldn’t get a pulse reading in your toes and we heard scary words like “amputation” if circulation didn’t return.
God answered.

We prayed healing for the infection and collapsed lungs in the tough recovery as you struggled to breathe on your own again and had to repeatedly be intubated.
God answered.

We prayed through dark days seeing you crying, gagging, and throwing up in pain with no noise coming out of your mouth because of the tubes paralyzing your vocal cords. We prayed for the ability to one-day hold and comfort our hurting child and to hear her cry.
God answered.

We prayed for a miracle when your arrhythmias skyrocketed your heart rate to dangerous levels and extreme and painful measures were taken to restart your heart multiple times and correct the electrical damage.
God answered.

We prayed that you’d learn to eat and that we wouldn’t go home from the hospital on a feeding tube.
God answered.

We prayed for months as you lived hooked up to a Pulse Ox Monitor, and slept with an apnea monitor regularly alarming because you couldn’t breathe efficiently. We lived with tanks of oxygen in the house and gadgets always hooked up to you. We prayed that you’d live a normal, healthy life free of wires and monitors.
God answered.

We prayed for answers as doctors tested for asthma, pertussis, RSV, Cystic Fibrosis, pulmonary hypertension, AIDS (a risk from all the blood transfusions)….all scary prognosis as your fragile immune system battled for the first two years of life.
God answered.

We prayed for God to redeem your story. Your pain. The heartache and suffering. We prayed for strength to praise Him, no matter what the outcome and for our faith to be built through you.
We prayed for your life to be a testimony….come what may. We prayed that God would teach us peace, shalom, through so much uncertainty and fear.
God has and continues to answer! We celebrate you my girl. Today I watched you run in your relays at school and marveled at how far you’ve come from the baby in the ICU 8 years ago today whom we didn’t know if she’d survive or not. God has done this. Your life is our biggest answer to prayer and we say thank you Lord!!!