Support Jayme, Dylan, and Baby Dimitri's Journey

My name is Tiffany Kufer. I am a mom, and this year I became a gramma. My daughter Jayme was super excited about 2023. She became a lead teacher at work and she was about to be a mom. Although the getting married thing keeps getting postponed (first COVID, then some other issues), her life was on the right track.

She went in for a check-up in March and a normal glucose test. When they called her with the results, they told her to go to the emergency room immediately. She did but had no idea they were going to scare her and tell her she now had gestational diabetes and now her life and the baby's life were both in jeopardy. She was in the hospital for three days. Both she and her fiancé, Dylan, missed work and were very scared, but she did everything she was supposed to do. After lots of appointments, medications, and dietary restrictions, she made it through her pregnancy and was induced on May 23, 2024. She had a sweet baby boy, Dimitri Ullrich Cain Kufer. Everything seemed fine until they told us he had a little tuft of hair and a dimple on his butt that they needed to do an X-ray of just to rule out some stuff. Without giving much detail, they did the X-ray. When the news came back, it was a little more difficult to take than we expected. Poor little Dimitri is going to need surgery. He has a tethered spinal cord, which, for those of you who don’t know (because I certainly did not), their spinal cord should move freely and his does not. The bottom is kind of wrapped up in a bunch of little cells so it can’t move. If the surgery doesn’t happen, it will cause a lot of long-term damage. In the meantime, he can’t get sick. His MRI is scheduled for September 20th and we will find out then when the surgery will be. They wanted him to be a little bigger and a little stronger before they did the surgery.

I wish I could say that was the only thing these poor kids were going through.

On August 8th, Jayme’s 30th birthday, Dylan found out he has cancer. Luckily, it is the treatable kind, but let’s face it, cancer is cancer. Radiation is poison and treatment is not easy. Doctor appointments for Dylan and Dimitri and time off of work and the bills are not taking a break. Unfortunately, they used all of their time off for maternity/paternity leave, so all the appointments are unpaid days off.

They have to drive to Lurie’s Children’s Hospital for all of Dimitri’s appointments and neither of their vehicles are great, so they are asking for rides from other people.

With all this said, we ask that you pray, share, and maybe help if you can. It takes a village. I am not sure if I am asking for too much. I was not sure what to ask for. I have never done this before.