But unlike her first 2 surgeries, this one didn’t go well. On Saturday morning, we had the first of a few very difficult conversations with the Cardiologist. Cora had an unstoppable bleed on her Aorta. They gave her a liter of blood that night and they feared she wouldn’t make it through the weekend.
At this time, we knew we would truly need a miracle. We reached out on social media, and pretty soon Cora had thousands of people praying for her on all parts of the world.
We prayed for miracles and God heard us. The bleeding stopped over the weekend and I knew God had granted this miracle. But Cora still had more work to do. Monday morning, she began having seizures. Cora’s team grew more concerned about her. That night, we had another hard conversation. They truly felt that Cora wasn’t going to live. They gave us a decision to make. We could stay at Doernbecher and continue on the course we were going on, we could start comfort care and let her pass, or we could transfer back to Seattle Children’s Hospital in the hopes that she would one day recover enough to be a candidate for a heart and lung transplant. We were so heartbroken to have to be faced with this decision.
We knew this wasn’t a decision we could make without prayer and faith. On Tuesday morning, Derek and I prayed for an answer. When we were ready, we wrote down on separate slips of paper what we felt. We exchanged the papers with each other and when we opened them up, they both read the same word, ‘Seattle.’
As the day progressed, Derek and I both began to feel more and more like Cora’s life here on Earth was coming to a close. We realized that instead of Seattle being the answer, it was just another lesson. That Cora taught us that we needed to pray and have strong enough faith to know that we would both write down the same word, but the word itself wasn’t really the answer.
