Hi, my name is Brittany. And I don’t know where to begin with this story, so I guess I’ll just start at the beginning.

In 2012, I found out I was pregnant with my 2nd child. At only 9 weeks and 3 days, I had a massive placental abruption. By the grace of God, the tear in my placenta did not interfere with my son, Tony; it tore just beside it. That left the rest of my pregnancy a high-risk pregnancy. With only a 5% chance of survival, my baby made it.

5lbs 5oz & 18” of nothing short of a miracle!

Fast forward to 2019, Tony is 7 years old & it’s time to get a usual surgery a lot of kids experience: tonsils taken out & ear tubes placed. Since he’s young, they gave him some meds to make him nice & relaxed before going in for surgery. This caused him to be so relaxed he was holding his neck back further than normal. Lo and behold, a large cyst just hanging out on his upper neck. His surgery was canceled right away until further investigation of this lump on his neck.

So we get the testing done, and by the beginning of 2020, Tony received his ear tube surgery and surgery on his neck to remove the cyst.

Back then, we didn’t know it was a congenital birth defect. We didn’t know that the chance of it reoccurring was higher with each surgery. We didn’t know it would be 2025 and he would have an added heart condition and can’t go to school, so he’s virtual, because of all this. And we for sure didn’t know that he would still have another cyst on his throat bothering him and swelling to a massive size whenever it wants.

Early this year in April, I had the scariest day of my life. And so did Tony. I’m just not sure he realized it like I did. We were going in for another surgery. This time, we remove the bone that’s harboring the congenital birth defect. Removing the bone means removing the cysts forever. This is what we want because when the cysts swell, it not only swells massively outward but it goes inward also & presses right on Tony’s trachea, making breathing, eating, swallowing, talking, laughing, and neck movement extremely difficult. Needless to say, it’s dangerous, super dangerous. So the plan was to go get that bone out, the hyoid bone.

Everything is fine at first, then they take Tony back to get surgery going. The anesthesiologist starts to put him under & Tony’s heart rate and blood pressure tanks. She reverses the meds and gives him wake-up meds. He doesn’t respond normally. He doesn’t wake up right away. He’s alive, but something isn’t right.

The doctor is back in our room within 2 minutes of taking him back. My stomach has never dropped so fast in my life. He says, “Okay, now Tony is alive, he’s okay. But something did happen and we aren’t doing surgery. They started to put him under and he started to tank. Once they get him woken up, we’re bringing him back in here.”

I could have thrown up; that couple of minutes were so intense.

What I was not ready for was it taking 3 hours for him to wake up, become responsive, have a leveled blood pressure, and a slightly decent heart rate.

It was low, low, low, like 20 beats per minute low.

Now surgery has been canceled, we’re in the middle of diagnosis for Tony’s heart because no, this did not resolve itself; it’s still ongoing.

The main things I know now are:

Tony is experiencing heart block up to 2.8 seconds. If you experience 3 seconds, you’re required to have a pacemaker & heart block can be fatal, especially at night while sleeping and early in the morning.

Tony is now seeing a new ENT in our state’s top hospital, and surgery is scheduled for February. As a mother, I’m a nervous wreck. His heart issues are still not solved & he HAS to have surgery on his neck.

I don’t know what our outcome will be, but I know my husband being the only one with a job right now is breaking our backs. We’re bending backwards to try to make every penny stretch. Obviously, with Tony’s condition, I am not working at all. And it’s taken its toll, badly.

A few years ago, we bought a fixer-upper house, the only thing we could afford. And now almost every window in the house is ready to break or has broken. The floors need to be redone. The list goes on and on.

We just need a little help and a little hope. Hope that Tony is going to be okay. That our house isn’t going to fall apart before we can fix it up. Hope that we can even afford to make it to Christmas if I’m totally honest.

We live 2 hours from the Children’s Hospital. Just last week I drove a 4 hour round trip for a 10 minute appointment for Tony. It’s costing a ton of money just to keep up, much less buy Christmas or do anything we may need.

We love everyone, we pray for everyone, and we thank everyone.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️