When the Alligator Opens

It was 2004. We were just checking in to the Renucci Hospitality House at Helen DeVos Children's Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Our daughter, Olivia, then two, was there for another round of appointments with her specialists. After a warm welcome and quick hello to the fish in the aquarium, we headed to our room. "When the alligator opens, you go inside!" she instructed.

The elevator opened and in we went, facing the unknown head-on.

"How do you do it?"

I've been asked this question more times than I could count. No one asks for a situation like ours. You just take it one step at a time, one day at a time. Always making the best of the situation at hand.

Olivia had faced the alligator since birth, actually before birth. A partial abruption of my placenta left her literally starving in utero, the placenta crippled in its ability to provide desperately needed nutrients to her growing body. She was my third child. Her siblings, both preemies, brought warnings of her eminent premature birth. Despite bed rest, I experienced frequent contractions and remained small, warning bells of an impending problem. Yet the complication amazingly went undiagnosed until days before her birth, by Caesarean section, during her thirty-fourth week. She weighed just 2 pounds 9 ounces. A true miracle at the beginning of her journey and ours.