03/05/2026
Life is about helping others - especially helping those in need..please read and pass on if you can! This is from my friend Mindi - she and her husband have a been blessed by adoption, but some of their kids have severe health challenges ( some are life threatening) and could use some help. 🩵
Her story is below:
My story reads like a soap opera. If I hadn't lived it, I wouldn't believe it myself.
I was born in 1968, to a "blended" family. My Mom had two children (my brother Rick and sister Gayle) and my Dad had three children (my brother Jim and sisters Sue and Beth), the got divorced and married each other. They had three daughters together, my sister Lisa, my sister Kathy Jo and myself. Eight children. Chaotic household and upbringing.
When I was 11 years old, my sister Lisa (13) and Kathy Jo ( and I (11) were standing beside the road in Chester, VT, waiting for the school bus. A car came around the corner, slid on black ice, and landed on my two sisters, throwing me across the road into our front yard. I had a concussion and broken arm, my older sister Lisa had a broken back and her foot had to be repaired in order to allow use. My little sister Kathy Jo was crushed underneath the car. Every bone in her body was broken. She died that day. November 29, 1979.
When the accident happened, my Mom turned to her Bible and Church. My Father turned to the bottle. My Father was a verbally, mentally and physically abusive drunk. There was talk among my older siblings that my Father had molested them. My Father died of cardiac arrest in 1993, at the age of 55. My Mother went on to meet and marry a decent man, my step-father Wally. She was with him until his death.
When I was 18, I met my future ex-husband, Mark. I was 23 when we married. Mark was 12 years older than me. He didn't believe in working (and so I worked 80 hours a week to pay the bills). He smoked pot and watched cartoons all day long. He was physically, mentally and verbally abusive. We separated, and eventually divorced, when I was 30 years old. I was lucky to have lived through his abuse.
When I was 33 years old, I met my now husband, also named Mark. He replied to my "Love @ AOL personal ad. We met on May 25, 2001. Bought our first house together in September 2001. Got engaged on my birthday, April 21, 2002. Married on June 21, 2003 in Las Vegas, NV.
Mark is the polar opposite of my first husband. In 24 years, he has not raised his voice to me. He has never, and would never, hit me. He has an amazing work ethic, which has brought us from living in Vermont, to living in Minnesota, to our final destination in 2007, of Neenah, WI.
In 2010, at the age of 37, I found out that I was pregnant. We had been trying, we had procedures done, I took medication to help. We found out at the beginning of October 2005 that we would have a baby. On January 4, 2006, I went into labor at home, in my second trimester. I delivered our son Daniel at home, too early to survive.
I conceived again in June 2006. We lost that baby in August, 2006. No reason why. Just an early loss.
After that, we trained to become foster parents and had fostered over 20 babies up until 2010. In October 2010, I found myself pregnant at the age of 42.
We went to have an ultrasound done for this surprise baby. While they didn't find the baby on the ultrasound, they did end up finding many tumors on my bladder at that time. In November 2010, I lost our baby and started chemo in the same week. We named that baby "Angel", for saving my life and finding my tumors.
In 2010 and 2011, I had chemotherapy. In March 2011, the surgeons took my bladder and my uterus and built me a new "fake" bladder inside of me, with my own intestines. It's called an Indiana Pouch. I now catheterize through a hole in my belly. I am alive.
From 2010 until 2014, I was in and out of the hospitals, lots of medical issues associated with my new bladder. Lots of infections, bruising, cysts on my kidneys. Lots of inpatient stays, lots of wondering if I would have been better off dying from my cancer. With lots of research on my part, I was able to figure out why the infections were happening, went on a supplement called D-Mannose, and have avoided the hospital ever since!
We had been fostering on and off this entire time. We had friends who had adopted many children through foster care. Since my uterus was taken at the same time as my cancerous bladder, we had no chance of conceiving on our own. We got tired of saying goodbye to all of our foster babies, and decided to have a home study done.
Our first study was complete in October 2014. On November 14, 2014 (my Mom died of pancreatic cancer a year to the date of our phone call), we got a call from the agency, Special Angels Adoptions, about a baby girl in Texas who needed a family. All we knew as I hopped on the plane to San Antonio, TX was that she was three months old and was in the NICU in San Antonio.
Turns out, our daughter had/has CHARGE Syndrome
We stayed in Texas for two weeks, to be trained on how to take care of our new daughter. Her birth parents named her Teresa, and we kept that name for her, calling her Tess. We gave her the middle name of Katherine, after my little sister who passed away at the age of 8.
Tess had open heart surgery before she was a month old. She had a gtube put in so she could get her nutrition. She is deaf. Tess is a triplet, her two sisters live with her birth parents in TX and we keep in contact. They could not keep her because she had to live in isolation. She had two older siblings and her two triplet sisters and her birth parents could not guarantee that they could take her to North Carolina for her life-saving thymus transplant. She was born with no thymus, which regulates her immune system, and she and I lived in North Carolina for 5 months in order for her to have her thymus transplant. It saved her life.
While I was in North Carolina with Tess, my Mom was dying of pancreatic cancer in PA. The decision to stay in isolation in NC and not be by my Mom's side while she died haunts me to this day. My Mom passed away one year to the date that we got the phone call about our daughter Tess. I think I made the right choice.
Tess is now 11 years old and doing great! She has Global Developmental Delays, wears a hearing aid, needs another heart surgery soon, and is going to an amazing school in the town next door that specializes in children with behavioral needs and autism. She is a great big sister to her three brothers and one sister.
We adopted Adam in 2016, when he was born. He is the birth son of the niece of one of the people my husband went to school with. Tess and I lived in Michigan for a month prior to his birth and went to every one of his birth Mom's appointments. I induced lactation and was able to breast feed Adam for four months. I was there for his birth, I cut his cord, I was the first to hold him. He is my heart. He is now 9 years old and an amazing, neurotypical boy.
When Adam was 2 and Tess was 4, we had another home study completed. Someone on Facebook saw that we were interested in adopting again, and got in touch with the agency, again in Texas, who was looking for a family to adopt a baby girl, yet to be born, who had Down syndrome and the possibility of Agenesis of the Corpus Collosum
We flew to Dallas and arrived just a few hours before Quinn was born. There was an MRI ordered on her immediately, and they found that she did NOT have ACC. She does have Down syndrome, she did have failure to thrive and had an NG tube to feed her. She did go through a lot of therapies to help her feed. And she is now a tiny little tornado of a girl who is loved by everyone in her second grade class.
Another home study, another phone call asking us to adopt a baby boy due to be born with Down syndrome. When we arrived at his hospital room, the day of his birth, the room filled with doctors.
That is when we grew to understand what a Nephrologist was. You see, the agency had neglected to inform us that Isaac was in renal failure. He was put on dialysis while in Dallas. We had him life- flighted to our local Children's Hospital in Milwaukee, WI when he was three weeks old. He has not been on dialysis since.
But. Isaac is now in stage five renal failure. He was been put on the kidney transplant list. He has had, all told, 14 doctor's appointments over the past two months, readying him for his transplant, whenever a kidney is found. And now we wait. And hope and pray that a match is found. We have asked friends and family to be tested to see if they are a match.
And because we might be a little crazy, we had one more home study completed in 2023. Our study had been complete for a week when we got the phone call....on the anniversary of the car accident that took my sister's life.
The agency wanted to run a situation by us. A little boy, a few weeks old, was in the PICU at the local Children's Hospital. He had a tracheostomy. He had a gtube. He is deaf. He has Goldenhar Syndrome
We went to meet Levon on the anniversary of my Mom's birthday. The day after meeting him, after lots of thought and talks with our kids, we decided to adopt him. His birth parents had named him "Levi". Mark and I had discussed if we adopted a baby boy, naming him Levon after the Elton John song. We were going to call him "Levi" as a nickname. Serendipity.
Levon, like his older brother Isaac, was in the PICU and NICU of the Children's hospital for five months. We finalized both Isaac and Levon's adoptions in the hospital. We were able to finalize both children's adoptions sooner than typical. We were not sure that either of them was going to live.
Levi is now 2 years old, still on a trach, still has a feeding tube, is still deaf, and he is such a strong, stubborn, sweet little man!
Isaac is now five years old. He has chronic lung disease and has been intubated three times in his lifetime. He is almost done going through all the assessments in order for him to be a kidney transplant list. And now, we wait.
My husband is going to be taking Family Medical Leave when the transplant happens. We are planning on three months of being at the hospital 90 miles away. We are going to take turns living at the Ronald McDonald House and the hospital with Isaac, and staying at home with Tess (CHARGE Syndrome, deaf, cardiac issues, behavioral issues, thymus transplant), Adam (neurotypical), Quinn (Down syndrome), and Levon (Goldenhar Syndrome, trach, gtube)...for however long it takes. We have an Amazon gift card list set up, to help our family while in Milwaukee and while at home, running two households with no paycheck from Mark.
https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/dl/invite/AQICAHild4Vpadjqcz7bdgUf6Qu6-OaRt7P_FJRNNbyMlg-OQwFU8y4GTUYO1XWQsnuvP8AEAAAAkTCBjgYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIGAMH4CAQAweQYJKoZIhvcNAQcBMB4GCWCGSAFlAwQBLjARBAxoVlY40JYMp8rGgrMCARCATPQEQgPszh8xD82q-pUB-pdSkGgcj_NTK_gDM07XRPebSVDx-cIKdnIfFrsbNsOH0iPeMn6IZDMToqzfPTnxPeDOO_ohMxqMaVaUUIM?ref_=wl_share
A friend whose son has gone through a kidney transplant has started a GoFundMe account for our family in order to help us through this time.
https://gofund.me/f3a016537
Donate to Support Isaac's Life-Saving Transplant, organized by mindi pia...
This is Isaac. Isaac is four years old. Isaac has Down syndrome, chronic lung … mindi piasecki needs your supp...
Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.
This is Isaac. Isaac is four years old. Isaac has Down syndrome, chronic lung … mindi piasecki needs your support for Support Isaac's Life-Saving Transplant
