Say Some Prayers with Me?

Andrew and Cristina

I meant to post about this a few days ago. Two of my fellow contributors at Ignitum Today, Andrew and Cristina, are newly married, newly pregnant, and facing some pretty tough times. Their unborn daughter, Maria Isabella, has spina bifida. They were approved for the in-utero surgery developed by doctors at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, and the surgery was successfully completed this morning. 

However, this family is not out of the woods yet. The next two days, as Andrew says on their blog, are “are crucial in making sure that her (Cristina’s) contractions don’t lead to a necessary delivery.” Little Maria Isabella is just over 20 weeks, so it is extremely unlikely that she would survive outside the womb.

But it isn’t just the next two days that this couple needs to get through. Cristina will need to spend the remainder of her pregnancy in Philadelphia to be near the surgical team until delivery. The two of them need to find an affordable place for her to live while still managing to budget enough for Andrew to be able to commute to and from his job in New York City to his wife and daughter in Philadelphia. Neither Andrew nor Cristina have a car, so the two are facing a long, difficult few months apart.

When I was reading Andrew’s blog post about the whole situation to the Ogre on Saturday, he said, “Do you ever read things like that and then think to yourself, ‘Wow, I’m a gigantic whiner’?” At the time I was annoyed and nauseous, so I said, “No.”

But the truth is, even if I didn’t think it at the time, I’m thinking it now. The surgery itself is one thing, but the long separation afterward, with this young mother alone in a strange city, without her husband most of the time, that kills me. That would be the hardest part if I were going through it. God knows I whined enough about being separated from my husband last fall, and that was surrounded by family, with three healthy children, my own car to take me wherever my whiny heart desired, and free buddy passes from my aunts and uncles that allowed the Ogre to hop a plane once a month to come and see us.

So will you join me in saying a prayer or thinking positive thoughts or even clicking over to Andrew and Cristina’s blog and wishing them well? I’m sure they would appreciate it.