“It was terrible. When I got pregnant, I was only 18… it changed my whole life. I finally started getting used to the idea of having a baby, and then they say she’s sick. She’ll have to have open heart surgery. She’s going to die if she doesn’t.”
This was the nightmare Kyleigh Jordan, a secondary education major at Eastern Michigan University, has spent the past 18 months living.
Kyleigh’s daughter, Gabriel Jordan, was born with a congenital heart defect. According to the young mother, “It’s basically anything wrong with the heart at birth.”
In the case of Gabriel, Kyleigh said, “Basically, your heart’s supposed to be crossed, there’s one [artery] taking blood out into the rest of the body and one [vein] takes blood in. Hers were going straight. So instead of crisscrossing through, her blood was just going in two giant circles, and she wasn’t getting enough oxygen.”
“First I met with my doctor, and she said, ‘we suspect [Gabriel] has a birth defect,’ and I probably stopped breathing… she referred us to Oakwood, and the doctor there was just terrible… He told me about four or five times that I do have options, but then he was like, ‘Are you sure you want to continue with the pregnancy?’ Look at her now! How can you even ask me that? She’s perfectly healthy, perfectly happy, and he asked me like four times if I was sure. Why would he do that?”
The young mother continued her story, “So I transferred my care to University of Michigan. They were awesome… and [Gabriel] had open heart surgery when she was six days old.”
During the time Gabriel was in the hospital, Klyeigh stayed at the Ronald McDonald house, “It’s like right across the street from the hospital… I got to be by her beside every day, I got to read her bedtime stories every night. I got to be part of her medical team.
“It’s really important for me to know what’s going on. They come in rounds, and if you’re not there every day, you don’t know what’s going on. People go into this thinking doctors know everything, but that’s not how it is. I was just as big of a part of her medical team as anybody else, because I was there every day.”
The Ronald McDonald House is a charity that, “provides a home away from home for families of children being treated at area hospitals and supports community programs that serve the needs of children,” according to their website http://www.ronaldhouse.org.
Klyeigh describes her experience at the house, “like a hotel. In your room there are just two beds and a dresser. There’s no TV in there, nothing. But now I realize they don’t want you to be isolated. They have TV rooms and game rooms downstairs.”
There’s a good reason for that too, as Klyeigh explains, “There was one day, my mom was not there with me, and my boyfriend was at work, so I was there all by myself.
So I went down to watch TV, and I was forced to talk to the other people. And it’s good because not only are you staying close to the hospital, that’s obviously awesome, but you’re meeting other families who are going through what you’re going through. Nobody understands your baby going into the hospital, but I could go in there and be like, ‘Gabriel had to get ventilated today,’ and they understand exactly what that means, because they went through it too.”
From this, Kyleigh learned, “There are ten thousand ways something could be wrong with your baby, and there’s only one way your baby can be born completely healthy.”
And it’s for this reason Kyleigh is trying to give back. Using Gabriel’s story, Kyleigh is making an effort to try to collect “one million pop tabs for the Ronal McDonald House in Ann Arbor.”
All anyone has to do to help Kyleigh and Gabriel is collect the tabs from pop, beer, energy drink, soup, pet food or any other form of aluminum tabs, and then contact Kyleigh. They can do so by either emailing her at ktlrighjordan@gmail.com or contacting her via Facebook at www.facebook.com/poptabsforGabriel, Klyeigh will help figure out a way to get the tabs from you to the Ronald McDonald House.
Kyleigh says, “Even if you don’t collect, even if you drink nothing out of a can, you hate cans- tell somebody else! So many people collect them for no reason. Even if all you have is one tab… every little bit helps… [Gabriel’s] so little, but her story is making a difference… if I have to exploit her heart condition to get people to donate tabs, then that’s what I’ll do.”
The mother says, “You never think that it’s going to happen to you. You get pregnant, you have a baby, you go home… Because I was healthy. I was young, I was healthy, I took care of myself during my pregnancy. There was no reason this should have happened…But congenital heart defects don’t care who you are, how old you are, or what you do for your baby. They happen to anybody. I wanted to help with the pop tabs because it’s free, it’s super easy, and people don’t have to give me money… And it helps.”
It does help, as is evident through Gabriel. “She doesn’t even seem like the same kid. I hang out with her all day, and I can’t believe. There was a time in the hospital where I was seeing her on those machines, and I kept thinking ‘She’ll never be normal,’ but she is the happiest kid ever. She’s so sweet. She’s so aware.
Obviously, I think she’s brilliant… like I taught her to blow kisses in like two minutes.”
Klyeigh concludes saying, “I don’t baby her… yeah she had open heart surgery. But I don’t want her to use that as an excuse. She’s no less than anybody else, if anything she’s stronger. Doing this, I want to show her, ‘You were nine months old and you [made a difference]! Yeah, I helped, but you did this.’”
