Hi everyone,

Never in a million years did I think something this traumatic would happen to my family. Unfortunately, it has, and we are dealing with things hour by hour.

So here is Zinnia’s story:

Daniel and I have welcomed our third baby into the world, a beautiful baby girl. She was born Wednesday, June 26th at 3:16am.

When Zinnia was born, she was not breathing. It took her team of doctors 30 minutes to bring her back. While this was happening, doctors also tried to intubate her. Unfortunately, her airway was blocked. We now know the cause of that was due to her vocal cords being webbed together or there is a tissue in her airway. She also was very swollen and had a lot of fluid inside of her.

Once doctors did a partial intubation and got her breathing, UVA was called immediately and she got transferred.

I also was transferred to UVA. My uterus filled with blood, I lost consciousness for a little, got hypertension and was admitted for a few days.

When Zinnia arrived at UVA, they rushed her to emergency surgery to intubate her and did a blood transfusion. They put her in a hyperthermia state where she would be cooled for 72 hours. Doctors did this to prevent any further brain damage. She also had electrodes placed on her head to monitor for any strokes/seizures. Thankfully, she did not have any strokes/seizures so that was taken off on 06/29 at 9pm.

On 6/29 at 8:45am, doctors started to warm her back to regular body temperature and that process takes about 12 hours.

The genetics team also ran some testing to see if there was anything there. But no answer yet.

On 06/30, an MRI showed multiple areas of Zinnia’s brain damaged. Unfortunately, it has still left us with a lot of unknown answers. Her heart has a hole in one of her chambers, her left lung is collapsed on the top, she’s on a conventional ventilator, has a feeding tube placed, her arms are what’s called bowed and her thumb has minimal movement, her thymus is deformed shaped it’s supposed to be a triangular shape but Zinnia’s is a circular shape, her arm muscles are loose, leg muscles are stiff doctors are not sure why at the moment. She has a brain bleed where her cerebellum is located and it’s also very bruised.

Unfortunately, Zinnia is not responding to certain tests. She isn’t very responsive to pain or light.

As of right now, she has been just resting away. She’s currently only using 21-25% of the conventional ventilator depending on her position.

Yesterday, doctors placed a feeding tube so she’s currently getting breast milk. She will have surgery some time this week (07/01-07/07) to fix either the vocal cord webbing or tissue in her airway along with a few other surgeries later on down the road.

Right now, we don’t know how or what Zinnia’s life is going to look like in the future or how long she will be in the NICU, but we are praying for a full recovery.

As many of you know, this is a very, very difficult time.

Anything is very much appreciated.

Please send love and prayers.