In a single day, our lives changed. What started as a morning of a routine appointment turned into a week of fear, uncertainty, emergency intervention.

We quickly had to travel to Pittsburgh for an extended stay at UPMC Magee-Women’s Hospital, where preeclampsia with severe features led to an emergency c-section just a few short days later, and at 31 weeks, our son Jasper was born.

This was a year ago. In the initial push for the GoFundMe, we were struggling to pay bills, costs, car maintenance, and gas to get to and from Pittsburgh to see our little one in the NICU. He is home. The NICU stay went well and I am forever grateful for the staff at Magee-Women’s Hospital. Jasper is doing fantastic and is a little firecracker of joy. But our first attempt at this gofundme largely failed. We had enough assistance to slightly scrape by over the course of 6 months, but not enough to cover most of the expenses or piled up bills that come with the NICU.

Our credit cards are maxed, our savings long since drained, and our ability to get ahead has been greatly stymied by the current cost of living. Mama had also had to take further FMLA leave for serious postpartum complications and we have been fighting tooth and nail for months to get the FMLA company to actually pay the money owed for this period of lost wages.

We have significant expenses to still cover for the car in desperate need of maintenance, multiple bills hovering in overdue, and large expenses that have been put off as we have struggled to keep financially together in this economic environment.

As such we are attempting the gofundme again, with hope that anyone might be able to assist or share our story and fundraiser to hopefully finally recover from this ordeal financially.

If you have the ability to assist or share, it would be appreciated by all of us. And we are hoping to put the traumatic time and consequences behind us.