Alexandra Beale Foundation

Miss Kassidy Harding

Kassidy was born on Wednesday, April 17, 2002. She weighed 7 lbs 14 oz and was 19.5 inches long. She is everything Frank and I could have hoped for. She is absolutely beautiful. As a first time mom, I was scared out of my mind about the whole labor process. Then there she was…our beautiful, healthy baby, or so we thought. We got the pleasure of being with her all day Wednesday and were looking forward to taking her home on Thursday when our worst nightmare came true and our life turned upside-down.

The initial scare of Kassidy coming out limp on her right side was soon dismissed because the pediatricians stated that it was most likely a pinched nerve from being squeezed through the birth canal. The function of her right side came back, so no one was concerned anymore. Wednesday night I noticed that she was twitching slightly on her left side when I was changing her diaper. Neither the nurse nor the nursery noticed anything that night. They thought I was an "over paranoid" first-time-mom. Once we were assured everything was normal, we packed up to go home and waited for the pediatricians to complete their final exam on Kassidy. This is when Kassidy started twitching again. The pediatricians knew that was not normal. They went to get the neurologists and they said that it looked like a seizure. That is when they took our baby away from us. We were devastated. We were not sure what was going on with her or why. They started with the tests: MRI's, MRV's, EEG's, cat scans, spinal taps, etc. No infant/child should have to go through all that testing. After all the tests, they found a clot in her brain that caused a stroke. We had never heard of an infant/child having a stroke. To our knowledge, only older people had them.

Her lower left and right lobes of her brain are damaged and will never be recovered. This is primarily the visual area of the brain. Kassidy is only 3 months old so we are not sure if she will have any disabilities yet. She seems to have good motor skills so far. She kicks and talks like any three-month-old I know. The neurologists noticed that her arms are tighter than most infants her age, so we have to work with them a lot, and the therapist stated that we should work with her hand-eye coordination also since it was that area that was affected most by the stroke. Kassidy is doing well so far. She still has a long road to a full recovery, but we are hoping and praying for the best. I guess she will tell us as she grows what we need to work harder on. She will be our precious baby girl no matter what challenges we have to overcome.

The doctors are not sure exactly when she suffered the stroke, but they do know that she had a clot in her brain that caused the stroke. She does not have any clotting factors in her blood, so they are not sure why the clot formed. We need more foundations like this one so we can find the answers to these types of questions.

Sincerely,
Frank and Sharon Harding