I’m not sure where to even start this, but hello! I’m Alexis and I’m Caity’s oldest sister. This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to write. I’ve never had to do anything like this before or navigate through feeling anything like this before so bare with me.
Any of you reading this who were blessed enough to know Caity or to have ever met her know truly just how special she was. This girl was a light in anyone’s life and only ever wanted people happy, and smiling. She couldn’t actually talk, but boy did she always have a lot to say.
Between her air guitar, remote control fake-microphone “singing”, her mooing sound she would make when you’d ask her what noise a cow makes or how one of her Dog’s named Dexter sings; to her hair flipping, crazy fluid dance moves (not sure where she learned those), to her sticking out her tongue to be funny like she’s a band member of Kiss is just the surface of what I’m going to miss about her.
For those of you who don’t know.. since the end of her adolescent years new health concerns began popping up and hormone shifts mixed with the COVID-19 pandemic did a number on her mental health. It became clear that being at home was not the safest place for her so she ended up spending the better part of a year (if you add up the months) at Harborview.
In the midst of all of the behind the scenes things we were working on to get her back to being healthy and smiling again she also started having seizures like she did when she was a baby when we were finding out about her chromosome deletion and the special needs that would accompany it. The seizures became prevalent enough to where we could almost guess when another one was going to happen. One lasted over 5 minutes and she had to be dosed twice over with a reversal drug to help her through it.
She’s always kept us on our toes when it comes to health related things. We found out she was type 2 diabetic thanks to an anesthesiologist who saw her blood sugar levels were in the 300’s before going in for a procedure that was completely unrelated. She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis which caused a bone fragment to actually break free and float in her knee; not to mention made most activities and regular walking painful and difficult- which is why she loved to swim. She also was non-verbal due to the type of chromosomal deletion she had- but that didn’t slow her down all that much. Considering how wicked smart she is. There’s quite a few other health conditions that are on her list but those ones seemed to be the biggest playmakers in causing her to have a rough day.
That is up until her seizures came back.
On April 30th at about 11:15 in the morning at Harborview Medical Center, Caity had another grand-mal seizure. Only this time after over an hour of trying to revive her.. they couldn’t bring her back.
This GoFundMe is for her. And for her immediate family to help us navigate what is about to be the most difficult of decisions anyone ever has to make. The “what now?” decisions. This will allow us time to grieve without having to force ourselves to go back to work right away, and will help us do things in her honor and assist in the financial burden that death has become in our society.
If you can not give, especially during these times, I totally understand. I just ask that you please read the Facebook post associated with the link and watch the videos posted that star the one and only- Caity. If you have your own photos and videos of her or with her please, PLEASE post them in the comments section on Facebook. She touched so many people and I’d like to put faces to all the names she always talked about.
The rainbow pictured is what we saw during the sunset of the day she left us. We like to think it was her telling us that she’s okay and pain free. 