I’m not good at sharing my emotions, but there comes a time in life where you have to. This is the time I come to let everyone know because I need your help to help my daughter Mary get another service dog. When I was pregnant with Mary and her brother Zach, things didn’t go right with my body. My cervix was weak because of the cancer cells I had taken out years before getting pregnant. They tried surgery to push them back up to grow, but that didn’t work because the epidural block failed, and I would have felt the pain of the doctor's hand inside me. He felt he could finish the surgery, so with that, they came out more. That left me lying in the hospital bed upside down, trying to keep them in as long as they could get ready for the emergency delivery of my twins. Talk about shock. Being told you have a 5% chance of them living. They delivered at 24 weeks, Mary at 1 pound 8 ounces and Zach at 1 pound. I couldn’t hold my babies, only watch the team of doctors and nurses take them away to save their lives. After delivery, my body went into shock and got a fever, but I couldn’t see them until I was better. I only got to see them a day and a half after their birth. Zach was so small and had so many complications; he had many surgeries his body couldn’t handle. He passed away on one of the worst days, 09/11/2001. That day, I finally got to hold him. Mary survived, but her life is not perfect. We spent months in the hospital, several months with tubes everywhere coming out. Her body was just too premature. The doctor was saying I have to realize she might be in a vegetative state for the rest of her life, but we couldn’t accept that. The nurse told Ryan and me we should get divorced to get help from the state to take care of Mary, but we couldn’t do that either, and we believed in God and our vows. We spent hours at the hospital learning as much as we could so we could bring Mary home. The doctor finally believed us that we could do all the care at home, but we had to agree to take Mary to one doctor they believed could help us to stay in Quincy to take care of Mary. Also, I couldn’t go back to work, so it put a lot of pressure on Ryan to work a lot. We had tubes everywhere, oxygen, apnea monitors, pulse oximeters, and a stoma. We had an appointment every day just to make sure her breathing was okay and she wouldn’t die in her sleep. The therapy we did with the therapist and learned everything we could to help our daughter. Talk about life-changing events, we lost a lot of friends because our life was changed forever. To even go out, we had to use our math to figure out if we had enough oxygen to go out with Mary so she could breathe. Mary didn’t talk until she was 5 or 6 years old, so we used sign language. She had mild cerebral palsy, so walking would come later in life, which again the doctor didn’t think she’d be able to do. Around 5, she started having terrible seizures with lots of meds and a V.N.S. that was implanted in her chest, run by a battery, but all of that didn’t make the seizures go away. Then the gift of Doyle came, a service dog that was from another child in our community who was severely allergic and couldn’t have him around her. Her parents thought of Mary, and wow, we didn’t know that Doyle was going to change our daughter's life. Mary’s seizures got better, and she started talking through Doyle. Doyle would follow her everywhere and help her. Doyle’s biggest job was at night; that's when the seizures were the worst. He took care of her and rolled her onto her side so she wouldn’t aspirate and die. He’d also let us know after by coming into our room to get us up, and he’d let us know during the day if we needed to swipe her with her VNS so we could stop the seizures before they became grand mal seizures, which she would quit breathing. He gave her independence to go out with friends without us always being there. Talk about giving us a life back, Ryan and I could feel confident to let her go out because Doyle was there for emergencies. This is where we need your help, so we can give Mary her life back and be independent because she hates us being on top of her at all times, but the seizures and not having Doyle have left us being like at the beginning of her life. We need your help to raise $25,000. We wish we could take out a loan, but with the way life is so expensive and having 3 other kids, we have to feed them too and pay bills. So we are asking our community to please help us out.