"One day before my first son celebrated his first birthday, July of 2007, I took a home pregnancy test and learned that our second child was on its way..."

Even more delightful, I had found out a few days before that my best friend of nearly a decade was pregnant as well, we would get to go through this wonderful time together! We laughed, we cried, we shared everything there was to share. Halfway through, we learned we were both expecting boys. My first is also a boy, and the idea of brothers blossomed in my heart and mind instantly. I imagined two little boys running around like my first was and the thought brought tears of joy to my eyes. I had the picture perfect pregnancy: minimal morning sickness, spot on weight gain, zero complications.

That winter, a flu bug went through our area pretty viciously. I avoided it for a while, but finally in early February of 2008 it came calling. I got the full load of it: fever, chills, aches, exhaustion...I’d never had the flu before, and I called my prenatal doctor a few times asking if I should come in and get checked. Oh no, they’d say, it’s just the flu everyone has. Take care of yourself, call if the fever lasts more than a week or if it goes above 104. It hovered around 102-103 and lasted 6 days, but finally, it broke, and I went on with life.

My next prenatal appointment a few weeks later gave me pause: I went in and was asked if they had mentioned anything about my placenta at my first ultrasound. No, I told them, suddenly cautious, No one had said anything. The doctor shrugged and smiled. "It was just a little low," she explained. "We’ll schedule you for an ultrasound, but it’s quite common, and most of the time it will move up and out of the way on its own. We just need to check." Properly calmed, I looked forward to the ultrasound: another chance to see the baby! How lucky I am! Usually by 33 weeks, you’ve seen everything you will get to see until the baby is born. I bragged to my best friend, who had received more ultrasounds early in pregnancy than I had, that I was catching up a little. We laughed, not knowing how true that would end up being.

That ultrasound changed my perfect pregnancy completely. The reason for it turned out to be just as the doctor had said: my placenta was well out of the way for a natural birth. However, my baby’s ventricles in his brain were larger than they should be, I was referred to a specialist who would take a better look. A few days later, suddenly terrified, I endured an hour long ultrasound in silence before being ushered back to the doctor’s office. He said that the ventricles were slightly enlarged, but could be within the range of normal variance. However (another however, I was beginning to hate that word) he saw some inconclusive evidence that my son suffered from agenesis or partial genesis of the corpus callosum, a debilitating birth defect where the bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain does not grow. I was shattered, terrified. What was I going to do?? He offered me the option of a fetal MRI to try to get a better look, but this late in pregnancy, even that may not be able to determine whether he was correct. We decided not to do the MRI; it would only be a few months until we found out for sure, and until then, we would just have to trust in God to see us through somehow.

The next month was long and difficult, but it wasn’t until March 6, 2008, that it all went to pieces. My best friend called to tell me that she had just gone in for a prenatal appointment and discovered her son had passed away with no warning. He was born still that evening. A few days later, I began to have some spotting and discharge, and all of the fear and panic and unknown of the past month crashed over me in a wave. I was convinced I was losing my son. I went in for an ultrasound on March 11, a day and a half after the spotting started, and they discovered my water had ruptured and had all leaked out. Danny was born that evening by c-section, blessedly alive.

The roller coaster was not over with his birth. He was born with great APGAR scores, but while they stitched me up from my surgery they went from sending him to the nursery, to the special care nursery, to the NICU. Within a couple hours, they were able to tell me some great news, and some not so great news, but there were no answers. On the positive side, the specialist had been wrong in his diagnosis: our son’s corpus callosum was fully developed and intact. Unfortunately, he had an enlarged liver and spleen, his platelet levels were almost non-existent, and he was having trouble breathing. It was 2 days before we finally got a diagnosis: CMV. All of the pieces fell together...the flu, the ventricles, the symptoms...and my 19 month old son, who attended daycare and was probably the one who shared it with us. I went through a good dose of anger about that last part, and the fact that I was never warned, that no one ever mentioned the risk...but there comes a point that you have to let that go and simply focus on what is, instead of what could have been.

For 2 months, Danny fought in the NICU. We were offered the chance to undergo a Gancyclovir treatment, an antiviral they were beginning to use for congenital CMV babies. We almost lost him once; a side effect of the treatment was a low white blood cell count, and that made room for an infection in his blood steam that nearly killed him. He bounced back, thank God, and came home shortly before his 2 month birthday to begin the second round of his treatment. For another 6 weeks, we dosed him twice a day with an oral version of the antiviral, and took him in for blood draws twice a week to ensure his counts were not dropping. Finally, after nearly 4 months of treatment, he was free and clear.

Danny is now 18 months old. After passing his newborn hearing screen, he was diagnosed as profoundly deaf in both ears at 3 months old, and received bilateral cochlear implants in January 2009. He receives physical, occupational, and auditory-verbal therapies, and has mild developmental delays. I feel sometimes like he is in a strange gray area; most CMV stories either have a child who is "typical" or a child who is greatly affected by CMV. Danny is neither. He started walking at 16 months and is doing extremely well with his cochlear implants...but we struggle every step of the way to get him where he is. The greatest challenge of our CMV diagnosis hasn’t been what is, it’s been what may be, and the difficulty of not knowing all the ways it is going to affect him for his life. We are far from being out of the woods yet, and know that many more diagnoses and delays could still present themselves. We pray they don’t, and pour our energy into giving him all the support and building blocks he needs to overcome what he has been through. He has a smile that can light up a room, and laugh that is completely contagious, and is such a happy soul.

- Submitted by his mother, Kelly