It's been almost 5 years...

With Cameron's birthday party plans in progress I was going through some old photos of when he was born.

Cameron with his apnea monitor that went everywhere with us 24/7

It's been almost 5 years since that horrible night when we almost lost him. When he was 4 days old and we came home from the hosptial with him and everything went from wonderful to horrific in seconds. The night he stopped breathing, went limp like a rag doll and started to turn purple. The night that I thought "I can't believe this is happening!" I can still see it all in my mind like it was yesterday. Me running up two staircases, two steps at a time, ripping my c-section stitches to get the phone to call 911 while Chan tried to resuscitate his tiny newborn baby. I remember all those days on the Pediatric floor in the hospital alone with Cameron. I was recouping from surgery by sleeping on a hard, fold-out chair while Cam was hooked up to all kinds of machines. He was so tiny in that gigantic hospital crib. We had no idea if we could still lose him or if the lack of oxygen caused any damage. Still to this day when I hear a beeping sound, I pause for a second. The sound of his apnea monitor going off will be permanently ingrained in my mind. The hundreds of times over the course of his first year when we would hear the alarm go off and we'd frantically run to him, startling him with a shake so he could breathe. I remember driving down 83 and hearing the alarm go off and cutting off to the side of the road and shaking his car seat and yelling "CAMERON! BREATHE!" Waking up at 4am to the beeping. Chan and I would bolt out of bed, rushing to his rescue. It was a long, scary year and even longer to see the full effects of what might have come of the event. We are so blessed to have Cameron here with us. He is such an amazing little guy. He's almost always happy, he's incredibly thoughtful and generous and he's super sensitive. To top it off, he is handsome and super smart!

I try to keep myself from envisioning a different ending to that scary night, but it breaks my heart to know that there are parents of 3,000 babies in the US every year who were not as lucky as us. I know exactly what they felt when they found their babies and I can't even comprehend what happened after for them. Every day 9 babies die of SIDS in the US. I wonder "What if he wasn't in my arms when it happened?" Even a few seconds longer would have made things turn out different.

I don't like to make blog posts that are sad, but I just wanted to post about how blessed we are to have our boys and how amazing Cam has turned out 5 years after that night and how my heart goes out to the 15,000 parents over these past 5 years who don't get to celebrate.

Ok, ok, enough sad stuff.