The decisions and risk we take for our children. A cancer-stricken Oklahoma mom shared only a few precious moments with her newborn daughter after she made a decision to refuse chemotherapy and trade her life to save the baby. This woman literally gave her life for her child. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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Stacie Crimm, 41, died from cancer in her head and neck last month – just three days after cradling her newborn for the first and only time, and staring deep into her dark blue eyes.
Now 2-month-old Dottie Mae is finally home from the hospital – and capturing hearts with her amazing story of sacrifice and survival.
She was on the front page of the Daily Oklahoman newspaper over the weekend, and her new guardian, Crimm’s married brother Ray Phillips, is set to appear on NBC’s Today show this week, a co-worker said.
“Sister would be so proud,” Phillips, 40, wrote on his Facebook page of all the attention the little girl has gotten. “Now Dottie will have something to show how wonderful her Mother really was. I am amazed.”
It was last March that Crimm bubbled over with joy when she announced the pregnancy that she didn’t think was even possible.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she told her brother, according to The Oklahoman.
Crimm said she took five pregnancy tests to confirm the good news because doctors said she’d never be able to conceive, Phillips recalled.
But elation quickly turned to worry as Crimm began suffering severe headaches, double vision and tremors that wracked her entire body, The Oklahoman reported.
“I hope I live long enough to have this baby,” she said in a message to her brother. “If anything happens to me, you take this child.”
In July, medical tests revealed the awful truth: she had cancer.
Phillips said his sister agonized only briefly over whether to undergo chemotherapy, a course of treatment that could have saved her life, but would have also risked the health of her unborn child.
Crimm prepared as much as she could before collapsing at home on Aug. 16, five months into her pregnancy. She was rushed to Oklahoma University Medical Center in Oklahoma City and delivered the 2-pound, 1-ounce baby via an emergency C-section two days later.
Crimm barely survived the operation.
“Sister was dying right there. She was gasping,” Phillips told the Oklahoman, noting how she fought through it. “The human body fights death.”
But Dottie was so undersized that she had to be placed in intensive care apart from her mother. And the terrible reality for Crimm was that after resigning herself to certain death to save her baby, both mother and daughter were too weak to be moved to see one another.
