Let’s bring Veya home!

Hello everyone ;

 

My name is Shelby, and as you know we have just endured a medical journey no family can imagine and we have met the most amazing family who has become so dear to our hearts. Our GoFundMe was a huge relief to us during our medical journey & I am hoping to relieve this amazing family in any way we can help. I am reaching out here to our community today for my dear friends Krystal and Jeremy Vanderbrugghen and their children; Ivylee, Irelyn, Lincoln and Veya. We are rallying together with hopes to continue supporting this family on their long complex medical journey with their youngest daughter Veya.

 

Veya was born December 4th 2023 with a congenital heart defect and Trisomy 21. (Down Syndrome) and due to her complex medical needs Veya has never been home with her family and remains a year later still at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto.  

 

Earlier this year, Veya went into full heart failure at just three weeks old which caused her to sustain an acute kidney injury which required dialysis. She was transferred from McMaster Children’s Hospital to Sick Kids in Toronto and experience pneumonia from being intubated for so long as well as pulmonary hemmoraging in her lungs from medication complications to treat her severe pulmonary hypertension that accompanied her cardiac defect. By a miracle she was able to go for her heart repair on April 2nd of this year. After spending three months in the Cardiac ICU at Sick Kids she was transferred back to McMaster. Since that time Veya has been having complications with her liver which sent the family back to Sick Kids in July. 

 

What was supposed to be a short stay at Sick Kids for a liver biopsy, has quickly turned into already a five month stay with no real end in sight as to when they will be able to bring their baby girl home. This family is likely to spend their daughter’s first birthday as well as their second Christmas in hospital.

 

Since Veya’s transfer back to Sick Kids the teams have been working tirelessly to try to find a diagnosis for what is happening in her biliary tree inside her liver. Veya has been contracting back to back episodes of cholangitis which is an infection in her bile ducts and will be presented to Sick Kids transplant team in the coming weeks to discuss the possible need for a liver transplant. Veya also was recently diagnosed with osteopenia (low bone mass) and has overcome two femur bone fractures, a wrist and shoulder fracture due to the large amount of medications she has been on since birth.

 

As you can imagine the extra expenses add up as this family has to be away from home and are currently staying at the Ronald McDonald House in Toronto. We’d like to help them with the extra medical expenses as well as support the family for the multiple therapies Veya will need once she is able to come home. Those therapies include: feeding therapy (as she has been tube fed from birth) physio and occupational therapy, speech therapy etc. We’d also like to support the family with the costs that come with tube feeding as well for (feed bags, fortificaiton formula, syringes, tube extensions, feed pump etc.)

 

If you are able to support this family with us in any way possible, I would be so appreciative and I know it would help them immensely. If you wish to read more about their journey you can follow along Krystal’s instagram page: @krystallynne.vdb

 

Please send this family a message of support and love on this page to brighten their day and encourage them through each day. Thank you for coming alongside this family on this journey.

 

Let’s help bring this baby girl home soon to her family.