Our daughter
Dagny was born on March 6, 2020. She was healthy and vibrant and beautiful. She had an expressive face, and we loved capturing her many expressions.
As a first-time mom, I had been told that the first two weeks of breastfeeding are the hardest. So I didn't really know whether what we were seeing was normal, or whether Dagny wasn't eating enough.
At twelve days old we took her to a normally scheduled pediatrician appointment and I shared my concerns. The doctor was unconcerned. He told us she looked healthy, that everything looked good, but that I should pump so we could get a better sense of how much she was eating. If we couldn't get her to take two ounces that afternoon, maybe we should bring her into the hospital in case she needed IV fluids.
She took an ounce and a half. We were torn over whether to bring her in. We decided to take her to the hospital, where once again we were reassured that she was feisty, that she was healthy. We were told they were just going to top her off with fluids and we would be home in a couple of hours.
A couple of hours later the situation looked entirely different. She was crashing. She was put on life support and we had no idea what was going on. Over the course of the night, things got worse. In the morning we were told she had been put on heart-lung bypass. We were informed that all her organs had failed and we needed to say goodbye.
She was fourteen days old.
We walked out of the hospital with nothing but a validated parking ticket.
