Stories from the OI Community: Stacy's Story

Posted on September 30, 2006 at 01:26 PM

This next entry comes from a mother of an OI child who adopted her son without knowing he had OI. She and her husband and truly beautiful people. Here are her words:

I am a parent of a child with OI. My husband & I adopted our son at birth. He is now 19 months old. We were not aware he had OI until his first broken leg.

Two months after his birth is when he had his first break. We didn't even know he had broken anything. He was crying and we took him to emergency care to see what was wrong. He was a premature baby and we thought he just didn't feel good for whatever reason. Maybe an upset stomach.
Well, the horrible nightmare began.
The doctors discovered after a day of being at the hospital that he had a fracture. When we told them that we didn't know what had happened, things turned incredibly horrible for us. They brought in SRS and started questioning us. We couldn't believe what was happening. We would never hurt our child but we were in a situation that we had to prove our innocense.

It was the most hurtful thing that has ever happened to us. The most horrible nightmare that we found ourselves in. To be treated this way when we did nothing wrong.

We had had several people tell us about brittle bones disease and even had done some research for us, so we pushed to have him tested. Sure enough, two months later, the test came back that he does have OI, Type IV.

By God's blessing, our child was never taken away from us. We left the hospital with him. But, we left with bruised hearts that have been so hard to heal.

This is our story and first experience.

He has since broken the same leg. He fell on a toy. We did have a much better experience at the hospital and were treated much kinder because we had proof he has a serious disease.

Thank you for letting me share our story and how it has affected our lives so far.

I am a very protective mother of my children anyway, but I have to really keep an eye on my very active little boy. I know I need to let him live and experience life, but it is so hard to relax with this disease. We adopted our daughter at birth as well. She is almost 6 years old. She also has a serious disease that she was diagnosed with at the age of 15 months old, Diabetes Type I.

You can see that I have my hands very full. We believe God gave these children to us and brought us together so we could care for them & help carry their burdens. They are the sunshine in our lives and we are very blessed.

Thank you Stacy for contributing your story.

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