Sophie Kate’s Journal

We arrived home with our little girl on 11/28/07 at 7:30pm, a great birthday present for Daddy.  Happy Birthday Daddy!  It was a long day but an exciting day.  A day filled with blessings showered on us by our loving God.  Throughout the weekend we were told that by the end of this week we were going to be headed for surgery (for feeding tube placement) at Children’s Hospital because Sophie Kate was not able to take all of the formula that she needed.  So many prayers were sent up for this huge need and God answered our prayers for Sophie feeding situation.  On Monday morning at 2:00am, Sophie started taking all of her bottle completely on her own.  She went from taking 5-10cc’s of her bottle to taking 45-60cc’s which was the requirement for Sophie to be able to go home without a feeding tube.  What a miracle!  God provided excatly what we needed excatly when we needed it.  Well, of course that changed the plans of the doctors and after a meeting with them on Wednesday morning we were told we would be going home that day.  We certainly did not know what was going to happen that day, but God did, because He is the One that goes before us.  Words cannot express the joy that filled our hearts, just to know that we would have our sweet girl home with us and that we would all be together as a family.  No more days and nights feeling torn between home and hospital, no more difficult partings  God has shown us that He is always in control.  To go from looking at surgery to being home together as a family was unthinkable to us but not to our God.  I have longed for this moment for so long, with every drive back and forth from the hospital, just to be able to sit with her and hold her and even fall asleep with her at our own home.  Even the things I probably took for granted with the boys like giving her a bath and dressing her myself and just caring for her as a mother wants and needs to do, I have not been able to do those things yet and it is going to be so sweet and so precious to my soul to experience those moments with her now.  Thank You Jesus, Your mercies and blessings truly are new every day and we give You the Praise, Honor, and Glory for it all.

     Sophie Kate’s story is really the story of our family and more importantly the journey that God has taken us on with Him, because in all of this the one thing we all have to remember is that it is not all about us, it is not all about Sophie Kate, it is all about Him.  God’s hand is all over this and the neat thing about this journey we are on with Him is that we are seeing the magnificent and amazing things He is doing as they are happening.  We are not realizing these things one or two weeks after the fact and thinking to ourselves, wow God was really in that.  These things are happening before our very eyes, talk about being in the moment.  I really don’t know where to start, so many of you have heard some or all of this already, but here goes.

  I went in to the hospital that Saturday morning because I had not been feeling Sophie moving around like she had been.  I had been there about an hour and a half when there were some complications with her heartbeat.  The doctor that was on call was Dr. Radbill, one of the very few doctors at Brookwood who prays with his patients, was already there.  There was a c-section scheduled that morning for around this same time, so the operating room was already set up and ready to go along with all the assistants the doctor needed.  The neonatologist {fancy word for Sophie’s doctor} was already there, which is not necessarily the norm on a Saturday morning.  You see God had already been preparing and providing for this situation and for us before we even knew we neede help.  He truly does go before us as Deut. 31: 8 tells us and Thank You Lord for that.  He knows what we need before we even ask it of Him.  Sophie Kate was born at 9:08 that Saturday morning, November 11.  We were told that she was not breathing when she was born and had no heartbeat, she had lost her entire blood volume, as her doctor would tell us later she had a massive bleed.  Sophie was resuscitated for 15 minutes and was given 4 blood transfusions.  We were painted a “grim” {and that is a quote from the doctors} picture during the first 24-48 hours of her life.  She was placed on a ventilator, she was heavily sedated and Chad and I were briefly allowed to touch her precious little hand.  Little did we know at that time that we would not be allowed to even touch our baby girl for days after that.  God continued to work in little Sophie’s life and within 3 days she had been taken off the ventilator and the day after that was taken off all her breathing support and was just getting a little bit of oxygen through her nose.  So her lungs were getting stronger, her kidneys were doing their job, and her heart was completely normal all of these things were miracles considering where she had been just 4 days prior.  The only question left to answer was the damage done to her brain from the oxygen depletion, and that was when our world stopped and froze in time.  From a CAT scan and as EEG we received news that no parent ever thinks they will hear or could even bear to hear about their precious child, brain damage, extensive brain damage.  It was just devastating.  Unthinkable, unbelievable this was not happening, this could not be happening to our baby girl after all the miracles we had seen from God so far, but we knew that God had a plan for our family and for our little Sophie.  We knew that God had not brought her and us this far just to leave us now.  He loves us and He hurts when we hurt and we knew that God was right beside us upholding us, comforting us with only the peace that He can give, and caring for our broken hearts.  He has given us everything we need as we have needed it.  He as truly taken us to the point where we have no control, the doctors haven’t given us alot of hope, He has stripped everything away except the hope we have in Him and we see that.  Our hope and our trust is not in doctors and medical reports nor is it in what the doctors have told us about what the future holds for our family.  Our hope, our trust, and our faith is in The One who set the stars in the sky and knows them by name, The One who formed the oceans just by speaking the words from Holy lips, The One who loved us so much that He died on the cross to save us from our sins, that is where our hope can be found and no matter where He takes our family in this journey we have the confidence of knowing that He will go there with us and we will continuously give Him all the Praise, Honor, and Glory for His work in the life of our family.