"Savanah was born on March 25, 2004 in Orem, UT. I had an extremely wonderful pregnancy..."

After 12 long hours of labor, Savanah entered this world beautifully. As far as we knew, we had a healthy baby girl. The following day, we learned that she had failed her newborn hearing screening. The nurse came in and reassured us that this is fairly common, and since she was a few weeks early there might still be fluid in her ears. I did not think another minute about it.

6 weeks later I brought her back into the hospital to have her hearing tested again. FAIL. The nurse told me that my Savanah was deaf, I was devastated. I immediately called my husband and we began researching as much as we could on deafness.

We were referred to a local ENT where he decided to run a TORCH test on her, after several weeks, the results for the "C" in this test came back positive. Savanah had contracted CMV. The doctor knew very little about it, in fact everyone seemed to know very little about it.

For our entire summer, it consisted of specialist trips and trips to the local children's hospital. Slowly, we started to learn more and more about CMV. I wanted to help educate more people, so many people around here know so little about it. There were MRI's, urine collecting, lab draws and more and more tests. I felt like we were stuck in a fog, being an experiment, so many professionals were still so unsure regarding the virus. I researched as much as I could. Savanah's grandmother, who has Lupus, also contracted CMV from Savanah in September of 2004 and fought for her life. It was a very scary time, I couldn't believe that my little baby could be so infectious at that time.

At this current time, Savanah is a very vibrant, extremely healthy almost 6 year old. She received a cochlear implant on April 13, 2007 and has done wonderfully with that. We feel blessed as parents, that she is a healthy child who has battled with CMV.

- Submitted by her mother, Sarah