The journey begins

Every story has a beginning, and this is hers.

In case you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her yet, her name is Olivia McDonald. She was born on December 15th of 2017, at Victoria General Hospital in Victoria BC. For the first 7 months of her life, everything seemed normal. She was growing and developing on par or ahead of most babies her age. She was happy and seemingly healthy, except for her lack of weight gain. Her hypnotic gaze and heartwarming smile would draw you to her and instantly make you her friend. She was the child we had always dreamed we would have. By noon of July 18th, 2018, in a moment that felt like a lifetime, our world as we knew it no longer existed. Olivia had become hypoglycemic and unresponsive, and then she began to vomit. She was rushed off in an ambulance to Vic General hospital in critical condition.

July 19th, 2018: day 2 of her first hospital visit

The amazing team of doctors and specialists were able to stabilize her while we waited on test results to determine the cause of her near-death experience. They determined that she had high levels of lactate and creatine phosphokinase (CK), both were symptoms of a metabolic crisis and rhabdomyolysis. She was intubated for the first couple of days, and as she began to make her recovery, she was able to breathe on her own, so the tube was removed. A couple of days later, she was showing great progress and things were looking up. However, something else was happening in her body that we couldn’t have predicted at the time. Her body had begun to build up a much higher level of CK in her blood than we had previously seen, and her doctors were beginning to get concerned that if it continued to climb, her kidneys would become damaged or fail. Given her critical condition, Olivia was sent to BC Children’s hospital in Vancouver, where she stayed for 8 days before the medical team decided she was well enough to go home. In my heart, I didn’t feel that she was ready to leave, but on August 3rd, we made the trip home on an evening ferry anyway.

July 25th, 2018: Olivia’s first helicopter ride to BCCH

Aug 1st, 2018: 2 days before her first discharge from BCCH

My intuition was proven right, and 16hrs after we were discharged from BCCH, we found ourselves back in the emergency room of Vic General. Olivia had caught rhinovirus right before we left BCCH, and by the morning of August 4th, she was in crisis again. In the 16 months that followed, our life was a roller coaster of ups and downs. During that lengthy hospital stay, we found out that her body wasn’t able to properly absorb all the nutrients from her food, and as a result, she would be dependent upon a combination of G-Tube feeds and TPN (IV nutrition) to survive. So while at BCCH, we were trained on how to mix and administer her TPN so we could safely bring her home. During the 16 months of her hospital stay, we made 2 more trips to BCCH and were discharged for a second time from BCCH on Dec 13th. We were able to celebrate half of Olivia’s 2nd birthday at home before her IV port failed, and we found ourselves back at Vic general. During the 5 days we were back in the hospital, Olivia had a temporary iv line put in, her IV port was removed, and they inserted a broviac line as a more long-term solution. Thankfully during that time, Olivia stayed healthy and stable, and on Dec 20th, we were sent home. To say our life at home so far has been a little crazy would be an understatement…. But I’ll get more into that later. Although my introduction of Olivia may seem long, I’ve barely scraped the surface of her story so far. I hope to share with you (to the best of my ability) the story of the most incredible human being I have had the privilege of meeting: our beautiful Olivia McDonald.

At a glance…..
So far since her first crisis, she’s been through more than 8 surgical procedures, received 2 blood transfusions, an iron infusion, developed kidney stones, and contracted more than 12 illnesses and infections that I can remember. At Victoria General Hospital, she’s been in every bed in PICU (some beds more than once), and more than 6 different rooms on the ward. She has also been in 3 different rooms at BC Children’s Hospital. She has traveled in 2 helicopters, 2 small airplanes, and on 6 ferry rides. She has gained almost 3.5kg, grown taller, pushed out all of her teeth, and her hair grew back. She’s been in the hospital for her first two Halloweens, first birthday, half of her second birthday, and second Christmas. On top of all that, she’s reached more physical, mental, and emotional milestones along the way. All of this happened within the time it took for her to age up from 7 months to 3 years old. Without the care Olivia received from her amazing team of medical professionals, her story would have ended on July 18th of 2018. We are forever grateful for Olivia’s medical team, everyone who provided physical and emotional support, and to all those who donated to our GoFundMe campaign. During Olivia’s lengthy hospital stay, we used our campaign to keep people updated on everything that Olivia had experienced. We also documented the good, the bad, and the ugly in hopes that her story would inspire others facing hardships. At the moment, our GoFundMe is the only place you can go to learn the full extent of what our beautiful little girl went through (however, that won’t be the case in the future). If you would like to better understand Olivia’s story, there is a link to our GoFundMe campaign at the bottom of this page.

Home again, home again