We are the Goertzen family and we have four daughters. We live near Harmattan on a little farm. We welcomed our little girl, Hazel, into our family on September 28 of this year. The delivery went well and doctors were ready to send us home but Hazel was not able to pass any stool. After two days of waiting for her to pass stool, she began vomiting and was sent to the NICU at Alberta Children’s Hospital. After amazing care and lots of tests for 11 days at the hospital, Hazel has been diagnosed with Hirschsprung’s Disease. This means that she does not have the nerves in a part of her colon that contracts and relaxes. Once she is big and strong enough, she will return to the Children’s for extensive surgery to biopsy along her colon and then remove the piece of colon that is affected if she has the short-segment type of the disease. We are not sure how long her next stay will be. We are managing well overall and getting used to a bit of a different routine as Hazel just needs a bit of extra support compared to a typical newborn. I work as a social worker in the school system and I had heard about Hope for MVC Kids and their amazing service though work. During the stress of everything, I had completely forgotten about Hope 4 MVC Kids and one of my family members reminded me as they have a friend who has been involved with the society as well. The social worker at Children’s also suggested it and had nothing but praise for all of the support Hope 4 MVC had done for other families she had served. It seems that other communities are not as fortunate as Mountain View County to have access to a society like this. A couple of days after applying, we were contacted by the society. Support came so quickly and we were overwhelmed and humbled by the care and amazing support that we were given. The support came exactly when we needed it. When stress and emotions are very high, it is such a blessing to have access to support that does not involve immense hoops to jump through or endless paperwork. We live about 20 minutes west of Didsbury so the drive to the Children’s is far and gas prices are high right now. We were able to stay in Calgary for some of the hospitalizations, but my husband needed to go back and forth to drop our kids off at school and run our three-year-old to the family for child care so we could attend to Hazel’s needs. We were given funds to cover parking and food as well which was so helpful. It was a huge relief to not have as many financial worries when stress was high when we were in the midst of so many unknowns with Hazel. We continue to have weekly appointments in Olds and biweekly appointments at the Children’s Surgery Clinic as a result of Hazel’s needs. We would definitely recommend others looking into helping or supporting Hope for MVC Kids cause. The people from the society were very supportive and made the process very manageable. We have so much appreciation for anyone who has supported Hope for MVC Kids in the past or in the future. We cannot even really express how much it has meant to our family that this support is available and that people have donated to this society. Thank you so much!
-The Goertzen Family from Didsbury
