Together Through Trauma: The Fouts Family's Renewal

My name is Patti Pavlic Bohne and along with my husband, Bart, we are helping our friends remove cement around the pool their son fell in and drowned.

After years of watching my friends and classmates, Kelly and Dave Fouts, disappointed by offers to remove the cement outline of the pool where Owen fell in, I couldn't take it anymore. I was becoming distraught and I am not living in their house!

Dave and Kelly have been taking care of Owen since his accident and are also reminded every single day of what happened when they look out their windows into the backyard.

This time - it's for real - my husband Bart and I have moved very quickly and hired a contractor to remove this cement the week of 11/11 and help this amazing family start looking forward to making memories again and celebrating this amazing fight and beautiful miracle of Owen.

This is costly and I'm calling on all of you to help give Kelly and Dave and their kids a gift that will literally change their lives forever.

The estimate is $13,000 to remove the old cement, take out a pool house, another play set, and provide seed and clean up.

Please consider making a gift that will help our friends and make lasting impressions on their family FOREVER.

To date, generous friends and classmates have raised $6,000.

If more funds are generated, we will be able to landscape and beautify their backyard and honor Owen at the same time.

Please read Owen's story here as told by his dad:

On July 23rd, 2010, I looked out our kitchen window and saw our 16-month-old son Owen face down in our pool. I cleared his lungs of water and started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but realized I could not do compressions in the panicked state I was in. I brought him up to our driveway while we waited for first responders to arrive. Neighbors started and maintained CPR until the ambulance arrived. One neighbor advised me to get on my knees and pray, which I immediately did. Owen was brought to the Fire Department and was transferred to Children’s Hospital by Flight for Life.

When we arrived at the hospital, before we were allowed to see him, the attending doctor pulled us aside and explained the severity of the injury to Owen’s brain and that they did not expect him to make it through the night.

Every day for the next 2 months we were wondering if today would be the day he passed. We were told that there was no hope for Owen to have a normal life and that we needed to consider what his quality of life would be and that we needed to ‘make the right decision.’ The right decision was to fight to bring him home and to spend time with his 3 siblings outside of the hospital. We fought every day for 4 months to get him stable enough to come home.

Since that first admission, Owen has gone through many medical procedures: a tracheostomy because he cannot swallow; Achilles and quadriceps cut so he could bend his ankles and legs; wrists serially splinted because his contractures are so bad; his colon removed because it became perforated; and rods placed in his back due to his scoliosis.

During these times I would pray two prayers: “Dear Lord, please heal my son fully” and “Dear Lord, give me the wisdom to know what that looks like.”

Owen has been fighting for over 14 years and although the list of things he is unable to do for himself is extensive, he is still here with us, fighting, every day. This is what Owen “fully healed” looks like.

I still look out my kitchen window every day upon the place where I found him so many years ago. The pool is filled with dirt and the pool house is unkempt; the yard around it is overgrown; but there, directly in my line of sight, along the concrete decking, not two feet from the holes where the ladder used to be, I can see the place where I found Owen that day. It brings me back to that moment in time, I can see what he was wearing, and hear the screams in my head, the panic all around, the way his body felt in my arms, lifeless and wet. It all comes back to me.

It is time. It is time to remove the last reminders of that day and start building the future, moving past the trauma of that place, and turn it into a place to celebrate the 14 years of fighting, and the victory that we have, which is our children and each other. We are ever so grateful to so many people that are trying to help us begin that healing journey.

We cannot do it without you.