Why Raising Stripes?

Our daughter is a zebra, not a literal black and white striped four legged animal, a MEDICAL zebra.  Doctors are taught in medical school when you hear hooves think horses not zebras.  It is a way of saying that you should not jump to the rarest of disorders first.  However, zebras do, in fact, exist and we have been raising one for the last 17 years.

Michelle was born a perfectly healthy (we thought) and beautiful baby.  Very quickly she starting showing her “stripes” so to speak.  She fell off the growth chart before she was 6 months old and was given many diagnoses over the next 17 years.  Here are the highlights…….failure to thrive, severe primary IGF-1 deficiency, chronic severe hypoglycemia and then more recently Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (Classical type), dysautonomia, POTS, and gastroparesis.  That my friends is a LOT of stripes!

She was relatively healthy most of her younger years but needed growth hormones and other hormones daily to grow.  Once she was done growing though is when things got really difficult.  In middle school she started getting injured very easily.  She started dislocating and subluxating multiple joints every day.  Her autonomic nervous system started to go crazy around the same time.  This affected her body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate and even digestion.

Today she needs 24 hour nutrition delivered through a GJ tube directly into her intestines.  She cannot eat anything by mouth.  A port implanted in her chest helps deliver several IV’s a week for hydration and medication as needed.

As you can imagine all of these diagnoses and medical devices come with a whole lot of  maintenance and frequent medical emergencies.

Remember, God is not glorified in the details.  So for now we will leave it at this.

As a family we are 6 members strong.  My husband (Dan) works for an international men’s ministry and I (Jamie) am now running the business that we started 20 years ago.  We are raising four children: Katie, Michelle, Alex and Rose.  We have 3 dogs (Scooby, Sydney and Maisy), 2 hamsters (Stumpy and Jax) and 2 fish (Sponge Bob and Hucklyberry Fin).  As you can see not only do we have a zebra but our life is a complete zoo 🙂  Our highest calling is to share the love of Jesus in any way or place we can, sometimes that is Africa and sometimes that ends up being Children’s Hospital.  Life is short, God is big and we are just along for the ride!