{"id":1266,"date":"2011-02-10T00:42:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-10T00:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/katrina.effexhost.com\/index.php\/2011\/02\/10\/my-son-my-hero\/"},"modified":"2025-01-11T02:07:26","modified_gmt":"2025-01-11T02:07:26","slug":"my-son-my-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/2011\/02\/10\/my-son-my-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"My Son – My Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is Ben. Isn’t he a handsome fellow? This was a quick picture that I snapped on Christmas morning as he opened the package of books that Santa had left him. If only I could convince him to read them now!<\/p>\n

Ben is my miracle baby. In all reality, he shouldn’t be here today. Let me give you a little bit of history. \u00a0On January 17, 1999, I went into preterm labor with his brother, Austin. Sadly, we lost him but in May of that same year, I got pregnant with Ben. I like to think that his brother was watching out for him because that was the pregnancy from hell.<\/p>\n

I found out that I was pregnant, literally one week before we moved from Virginia back to Michigan. Since I had miscarried my first pregnancy and we knew all future pregnancies were going to be high risk, I was told not to touch anything. I wasn’t to do any lifting of any nature. We managed to do the move but the day after, I started having sharp pains in my lower abdominal region and was sure that I was miscarrying. After a frightening run around Grand Rapids, trying to find a hospital (and being turned away at an emergency clinic because I had out of state insurance), it was discovered that he was just fine. The doctor figured that I must have pulled a groin muscle somehow.<\/p>\n

The one huge blessing in all of that was that when I called for a follow up appointment, the nurse in the clinic told me not to go there but to call a specialist. It turns out that it was the best decision we ever made and I am thankful, to this day, to that nurse for being honest with me and not just trying to get another patient for their office. Dr. Balaskas was an amazing doctor. I should know! I saw him every week for that entire pregnancy. I was also on full bedrest that entire pregnancy.<\/p>\n

He’s the one who caught it when I started preterm labor at 26 weeks. He’s the one who treated me time and time again for bacterial vaginosis (think yeast infection symptoms for weeks, ladies!). He’s also the one who realized, at 35 weeks, Ben was not as active as he should have been. The thing is, I never realize just how serious it was because he was so calm through out the whole thing. He tried everything to get Ben going and when it didn’t happen, he just told me that the hospital had better equipment and that I needed to go be listened to there.<\/p>\n

He’s the same doctor who I joked around with about never losing your sense of humor during the scary stuff. I believe it had to do with me counting dots on the ceiling while a resident removed my cerclage<\/a>. He’s also the one that saved my baby’s life when he determined that we needed to do an emergency c-section. You see, it turns out that my placenta had very few blood vessels actually in it and many of those that were there had clotted off. My baby wasn’t getting the oxygen and nutrients that he needed to survive. We were told later that if we had waited just another week, Ben wouldn’t have made it. He’s my miracle baby.<\/p>\n

Well, my miracle baby is now 11 years old. He has cerebral palsy due to the pregnancy (not due to medical malpractice!). He’s smart and funny and loves music more than any kid I know. He can also tell you just about any football game he’s ever seen, along with any WWE wrestling match he’s ever seen. He’s a great kid who never gives up. Sadly, he does have some physical problems. In fact, we’re considering doing hamstring surgery this summer to help with his gait. His writing is nearly illegible and he uses a word processor at school to type up a lot of his assignments.<\/p>\n

Here’s where I break down, folks. The word processor won’t work for him next year. He’s going on to middle school and what he uses now just isn’t big enough to handle middle school work. He needs a laptop. He really needs it now so that he can be working with it and getting used to it before it’s something he does every day. My miracle baby who has brought so much joy and love to my life needs something and I can’t provide it for him. Yes, the district would provide it but he wouldn’t be allowed to use it over the summer or even bring it home unless it was 100% necessary for an assignment. We really need to provide one for him and we just can’t.<\/p>\n

So, I’m going to reach out to you, my readers. If you know of anyone who is getting rid of a laptop, please have them contact me. If you know of a company who might be willing to donate one, again, put our names down. Lastly, and this one is the hardest for me, if you might be willing to donate money towards us purchasing one for him, please get in contact with me. I swear to you that all monies collected will go towards helping my miracle baby. He needs this to be successful as a student.<\/p>\n

Any help that anyone can give will be greatly appreciated. I don’t have much that I can give back, but I will give back where I can. If you can’t help, please don’t be sad. I understand and know right where you are. The fact that you stopped by and read his story (or the part I wrote here) means more to me than you can ever imagine.<\/p>\n

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This is Ben. Isn’t he a handsome fellow? This was a quick picture that I snapped on Christmas morning as he opened the package of books that Santa had left…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2570,"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266\/revisions\/2570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifewithkatie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}