Million Dollar Baby

I'm confident I was chosen to be Sadie's mother. To love her unconditionally. To protect her. To fight for her. To be her advocate when no one else will. I will always be all of those things for Sadie (and I hope much more!) but sometimes I just hate it for her. Like any normal person, I grow tired of struggling to find answers to medical problems or reasons why she is the way she is. I get sick of having to hide a pill in her breakfast in the morning. I get tired of bathing her first because I know I need to leave her prescription shampoo on for at least thirty seconds before washing it off.  I get sick of driving to Chapel Hill by myself praying all the way that they will have a new solution for our problems.  A new answer that will leave me hopeful and happy, at least for a little while. When I hear myself think all of these things (or complain to Kevin about us having to do them) I want so badly to step out of the dream and into reality where all of those things aren't really happening.  But, I don't. And they are.

If you read my blog in 2010, you'll remember this post. You know, the one where I talked about how I felt like my world came crashing down (don't worry, it didn't!) when we thought something "might" be wrong with Baby A (Reagan). Little did I know that even harder days were ahead and we would later find out that something was really "wrong" with our Sadie. I am certain since those moments, she has not stopped putting our hearts and mind to the test. In a nutshell, she was born with a partial corpus callosum (the piece of the brain that connects the left and right sides...pretty much how they "talk" to each other). But, it doesn't grow back and there is no fixing it. We are told this defect can/does lead to severe developmental delays (not walking, not talking, etc.) and/or learning disabilities. It's a wait and see type thing.  Is she meeting her milestones? Is she doing things right alongside her sisters? Yes and yes.

I'm convinced that Sadie will be a million dollar baby before it's all said and done.  Not that I have that kind of cash laying around, but before I even knew her name, I knew there was something special about her.  We gave her my great grandmother's name. Mostly, because we loved the name, but also because my Mom used to tell me stories of how fiesty Sadie Mama was. We named her well. Not only is she the snuggliest, tiniest, sweetest little girl, she is also the fiestiest.  She had to be- from the very beginning. In my belly, she was sandwiched between two sisters who were not only taking up a ton more room than she was, but also devouring most of the nutrients.  She was the only triplet who cried when she was born and that was a sure sign that she was born to be a fighter.

I'd love to say she got it from me. Just when I feel like giving up, I look into her eyes and realize what a fighter she is. It's been hard.  And you know what the hardest part has been? The helplessness I feel while raising Sadie. I can't give it a kiss and fix it. When I think to back to my 17th week of pregnancy when we found out "Baby B" had something majorly wrong with her, it feels like someone has punched me in the stomach all over again. But, life with Sadie could be so different. I could be sitting in the waiting room at Duke waiting to be seen by the pediatric neurosurgeon.  I could be praying at night that her shunt is working properly. Instead, I pray that her hair comes back.  That the steroid she just started taking allows hair to grow wherever she's lost it. That we made the right decision by stopping the antibiotic(s) she has been on since March. I hope and beg God to not let her eyelashes fall out or her eyebrows.  I pray that she has alopecia areata not alopecia totalis. And whether I'm praying about her brain or her hair, it's all the same.  I just want my girl to not have to go through so much at such a young age. I want her to grow up and feel normal and not be judged. I want her to love herself like we love her.

And if it takes every penny of the money we have to figure out a cure for what she has, I hope Sadie Claire knows I will happily embrace my million dollar baby.