When you become a parent it’s almost automatic to write down the dates of your children’s milestones. Rolling, sitting, walking, talking, running, etc. But when they have a terminal illness like MLD, you begin to avoid those dates because it generally means loss of milestones.

Looking back at my notes, I did not put a date, or even a month, next to when Olivia stopped talking. Stopped walking. Stopped sitting up on her own. Or lost control of her legs entirely.

But I did recently write down a month for when she stopped being able to eat and drink on her own. It was this month, July 2021.

We had been working for weeks to keep her eating orally as much as possible and drinking from the one sippy cup that she could actually sip from. But there was no denying this was something she could no longer do.

Sometimes she could barely open her mouth to put food in it. Things that she could normally get down no longer worked and would cause her to choke. Even water in her sippy cup didn’t work. We thought of thickening it as some MLD families do but she simply could not use the cup to make a sipping/sucking motion at all.

She is now 100% fed through her GTube. She gets Kate Farms formula for nutrition, water and her meds all through the tube. However, we do give her small amounts of water and juice in her mouth through a syringe so she has something to enjoy and keep her mouth from getting dry.

This recent loss of development was one of the many reasons we also decided she would not be starting school this week.

On top of the eating/drinking issues she has become more lethargic and is experiencing more pain. This has required higher doses of Gabapentin and THC 3x per day. Sometimes we even have to use Valium when those don’t do the trick.

She also usually only wants me for comfort. Dad, Grandma’s and her nanny Sheena will work here and there but more often than not, it’s Mom she wants.

So as we continue to keep her comfortable amidst her decline we chose to not send her into a new environment potentially filled with germs and people she doesn’t know but to keep her home where she is most comfortable and we can spend the most time with her for as long as we have her.