***** UPDATE ***** he has his 18 month check up/ follow up today and his hemoglobin is up to 11.2!!!! 🙏🏻💙🎉

This will be a bit long. But the details are important. My son Jacoby will be 18 months old on Thursday. Thank god I can still say “WILL BE”! This past Thursday morning he was sick when he woke up. He kept throwing up and he was very lethargic. He is usually still a very happy boy when he is sick so I called the pediatrician. They asked us to come in so we did. He is a very fair skinned boy. He has blonde hair and blue eyes which makes me look even more fair. But he was extra pale on Thursday. The pedi examined him and decided it was a stomach bug. But he has been seeing my son since birth and knew his paleness was way off. He insisted on checking his hemoglobin levels. When the nurse came to to draw blood, she could barley get any out of him. She got just enough to send to the lab. He put a stat on it and said he would call me as soon as he had the results. As we drove home I called my husband to tell him the results of his checkup. Not 2 minutes after pulling into my driveway the pedi called. He said “this may be a fluke since we couldn’t get much blood, but if this is his real hemoglobin level then I need you guys to get to boston children’s hospital for blood transfusion ASAP”. He sent us to our local hospital to have another set of labs done to confirm this number before we went all the way to Boston which is 1 1/2 hours away. Sure enough, that number was confirmed. A normal hemoglobin level for a child is 12. Jacoby was between a 2 and a 3. He had 1/3 of the blood in his body that he should have had. He was severely anemic and we had no clue why. So we went to Boston by ambulance. My husband followed in the car. My mom was at our house with our other sons. When we got there, they had to do a lot more blood work. I was so scared and thinking the worst. Best case scenario is that he had an iron deficiency. Worst case scenario could have been something like leukemia. When your body is that low on blood, your heart starts to work on overdrive. It enlarges and it pumps extremely fast and hard which puts it in major destress. We started his first blood transfusion around 3am Friday morning. He had 2 blood transfusion on Friday. He had another yesterday. 3 total to get him back to where he should be blood wise. We finally got all the tests back and luckily he showed no signs of anything serious. We could finally determine that he in fact had an iron deficiency. When we turned one, he went off of formula and onto regular milk like most babies do. Well the formula had plenty of iron in it to keep him going. But milk and food alone was not enough for him. He slowly became sicker and sicker over the last 6 months. No one would have known because it happened slowly so his body would just kept adjusting and he was his normal happy self. Luckily, he took very well to the blood infusions. They can be very risky. The heart can overreact to them and stop beating. Today we began his iron infusion. We got his hemoglobin level back to an 8. After all he had been through, he was healthy enough to go home. So here we are. I can’t sleep because I can’t stop staring at him. He started his iron supplement tonight. He has been so happy and full of energy. I am so grateful this turned out the way it did. Had he not been throwing up and we didn’t go to the pedi, his heart could have given up. He is my rainbow baby and now also my little miracle baby. I call him my double rainbow because he was born not only after a miscarriage, but I also lost my father when I was 37 weeks pregnant with him. He saved me in that very dark time. If you have read this far, I thank you. And if you have a little one under one or around one, please ask your pedi to check their hemoglobin level between their 12 month checkup and their 18 month checkup. Those are the standard times that they check it, but I’m sure they would be happy to do so in between. Pics bellow of what he looks like today compared to Thursday when this began

🙏🏻💙

Feeling great again!

We got the clearance to go to the awesome playroom!

Sound asleep receiving a blood transfusion

Snoozing with daddy

Very scared on the ambulance ride

My poor little babe when he was still extremely sick 😥