Alannah Trickett CDH family fund

Hello everyone my name is Katie Trickett. I made this page to help our family with bills, food expenses, gas for traveling and medical bills for our little girl. My husband and I welcomed our beautiful baby girl Alannah on July 19th. She was born with CDH which is congenital diaphragmatic hernia. She is on an ECMO machine to keep her alive. She also has a breathing tube, feeding tube and a chest tube. Alannah has been a miracle baby since the day she started growing. At 19 weeks we found out our daughter had a mass in her lung. I was giving a series of steroid shots to help make this mass go away which it did. However a few weeks later it came back and we started going weekly from Rockport to Boston for ultrasounds to keep an eye on it. After an MRI and echo cardiogram at 23 weeks doctors saw something else which was determined to be CDH. So the baby was being seen by many doctors during our visits to keep an eye on things. I was giving a second round of shots to try to get rid of this mass in my little girls lung, which worked and the baby no longer had this mass or fluid in her lung. Alannah was born on July 19th at Beth Israel hospital and we were surrounded by 30-35 people in the OR. They quickly took her away from us to put a ventilator tube in her throat to help her breathe because her lungs had only grown about 15% of what they should have been. She went next door to Children’s Hospital in Boston to the MEDSURG ICU. Doctors said she was stable and might not need to go on ECMO. The following day we went to visit her and the doctor immediately stopped us and told us she was VERY critical and could die at any moment and we needed to sign consent forms for immediate medical intervention. (Her lungs were not strong enough to take the carbon dioxide out of her blood.) We did, walked into the room and our little girl had so much oxygen going into her body that her tiny little body was literally bouncing around in her incubator, it was so heartbreaking we cried. They once again whisked her away to surgery. After an hour or so they called us and said the ECMO procedure went good and was helping her but they also found that there was an extra artery on her heart that was taking too much blood away from other organs and would need surgery for that so we had to give consent to that too. She went to the Cath lab and they went up an artery in her leg, removed the artery and patched her up. The following day they brought her to surgery, made an incision on her chest and pushed her intestines and liver back through the hole in her diaphragm and put a patch over the hole.

She’s been such a tough fighter until this week of August 5th where her heart rate was running in the 230-240 range. They have been able to keep it stable with medicine, but discovered she has what looks like a blood clot in her aorta which they are treating with heparin. It has been a real roller coaster ride for our family since we are expected to have her in the hospital for 2-3 months and have not been able to hold our little girl. We have two other little girls, Calleigh who is 6 and Lily who is 3 and they keep asking when their baby sister is going to come home. It’s so very hard to explain to them since they are so little. We are asking for any and all help during this time of need. We have been living off of our savings which wasn't much. I am out of work after the pregnancy and my husband isn’t quite working as we spend a lot of time in the hospital and have been staying with family closer to the hospital to save on money spent on gas and commuting. We want to thank you for looking at our page for support and thank you for any donations. We ask that you pray for our baby girl Alannah Marie and pray she keeps fighting and comes home soon!!!