Saying Goodbye to Wesleigh Anne

Please let me begin by saying that we have been humbled and overwhelmed by the incredible outpouring of love after Wesleigh Anne's death and during her illness. I will attempt to go over the last 24 hours in hopes that people will understand our mindset and what happened.

Sunday morning at 6:30am we received a phone call that Wesleigh Anne coded again, requiring chest compressions and medication to bring her back. At this point, she was on quite a bit of medication to keep her going. She was tired. We then had a conversation with the attending, Dr Graham, about ECMO. ECMO would be very dangerous for Wesleigh Anne leading to surgery because she would have to be on blood thinners for ECMO and then she would bleed really easily going into surgery. Also, if Dr Bradley had felt good about fixing her valve, he would have done it two months ago when he was already in her chest. That left us with the options of a mechanical valve or a transplant. A mechanical valve would leave Wesleigh Anne on blood thinners for life. That means while learning to walk, ride a bike, rollerskate, etc. A transplant would require nothing short of a miracle for Wesleigh Anne to make it through. After much, much, long, hard conversation and much, much, long, hard prayer we decided that we would not send Wesleigh Anne to surgery again based on the pain that surgery causes versus the benefit that we felt she would gain. Therefore, we felt that our daughter was being tortured by being kept on paralytics and the breathing machine while coding every several hours. We also knew that Wesleigh Anne was tired and didn't have much fight left. We then made the terrible decision to remove Wesleigh Anne's life support, which we planned to do this morning (Monday). Well, God knew that we could not handle the responsibility of removing Wesleigh Anne's life support. And we know that we have a faithful, loving God who never gives us more than we can handle. So on Sunday evening we planned to spend the night in Wesleigh Anne's room, holding her and telling her how much we love her. While we were spending time with her, Wesleigh Anne's vital signs started trending downward. It became apparent that she was not going to make it through the night. We continued to hold her and love her until she passed peacefully in our arms, around 1:45 am. We stayed with her until around 3:30 am and then said our final goodbyes. We know that Wesleigh Anne is in a much, much better place and that she's healthy and whole now, breathing easily.

I would be lying to say that Trey and I are completely peaceful with this situation. We are absolutely broken. We miss our little angel more than we can possibly express and we know that this hasn't even fully hit us yet. We have fantastic support from our amazing families and our incredible church family and North Conway. We also have wonderful, wonderful friends who have been with us every step of the way. Thank you all for your tremendous support and for your continued prayers going forward.

As for arrangements, we plan for Wesleigh Anne's funeral to be on Thursday at North Conway Baptist Church. I will post the time when it is set. We will then go to Sumter for a family graveside service. As we know more, I will post it.