I've recently been told that you should never be too prideful to know the difference between begging and asking for help when it is needed.

I, Carpenter Villarreal, and my wife, Brittney Villarreal, have recently had life, parenthood, loss, struggle, and hardship thrown at us all in a very short amount of time. Creating a new life was nothing short of difficult for us mentally, physically, and financially. But the painstaking journey seems to never end. Most recently, my wife got into a pretty serious car accident on December 27, 2024. The driver openly admitted to running the stop sign and accidentally T-boning my then pregnant wife's car, colliding with her rear driver side door and causing her to spin out uncontrollably and losing nearly the entire rear end and axle of her car, immediately deeming it totaled. She was immediately rushed to the hospital, resulting in the immediate care and very early birth of my beautiful baby boy, Anakin. We have since been here for the past seven days caring for the both of them.

The next part of the story I will let her tell herself.

I almost lost my life giving birth to Anakin. With my current health issues, plus the car wreck, didn’t help the situation.

The night of the car wreck I was officially diagnosed with severe preeclampsia.

After being admitted, I was put on medicine to help prevent me from having seizures and to help lessen complications in my pregnancy due to the preeclampsia. (Because unfortunately there is no cure for preeclampsia, and there is no direct medication to fix it)

After a long and hard 48-hour process of being nothing but absolutely sickly, I asked for a C-section. My C-section was approved in less than 10 minutes and was scheduled immediately.

After I received the spinal block and laid down, I noticed I wasn’t feeling right. That’s when I quickly realized that I was about to aspirate. (Something about me, if I don’t eat for a certain amount of time, I will throw up literally anything.) But I was so sick the past 48 hours that I couldn’t have cared less about eating. I couldn’t even drink water without it coming right back up.

As soon as I laid down on the table, I aspirated. Not once, not twice, not three times but FOUR. Chad, my amazing anesthesiologist, made the call to stop my current medicine and it fixed the issue.

After my C-section, we thought I’d be fine but boy we were wrong.

I didn’t even get to meet my son the day he was born because I was again so sickly because I had to continue the same medicine to prevent myself from seizing.

Katie, my wonderful nurse, took my phone and made a pit stop into the NICU throughout her entire shift just to make sure I had pictures and videos of our sweet Ani.

Today we were discharged and finally able to head home. It was heartbreaking to have to wave goodbye to our son for now, but I trust the wonderful doctors and nurses with taking good care of him. Brittney is doing well, but still is struggling with high blood pressure.

But of course, to finally put the ironic metaphorical cherry on top of the onslaught of things the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025 has brought us, we come home to the utterly depressing sight of our beautiful cat Stinker, who got to be a whopping 18 years old, having seizures caused by tumors in his intestinal tract and stomach, which we were completely unaware of until today. It appeared to be causing him unmeasurable amounts of pain and suffering, so we, with very heavy and burdened hearts, had to lay our poor boy to rest. He was a loyal and amazing part of this family for many years.

I say all of that to ask for help. I know not everyone has enough to give and share and I completely understand, especially coming from our current situation. Between the medical care required for the IUI treatments, Brittney and I being out of work because of the car wreck and birth of our child, and now the passing and cremation of our beautiful Stinker boy, we have fallen into financial hardship and now I begin to understand when to ask for help. If you read all of this, we greatly appreciate you and all of your help. Even if you cannot afford to donate anything, I simply ask that you share this around as much as you can.