My daughter was just like every other two year old child. She was full of mischief and always into everything. She was also a very loving child. She would constantly tell everyone that she loved them.
She was so smart. At the age of two she would sing her ABC's. She could count to 13, she knew her shapes and colors. She could also distinguish between him and her and knew the correct past and present tenses when she spoke in 4 and 5 word sentences.
She was not a sick child. On the day of February 13th 2000, Iput her down for her nap at about one o'clock in the afternoon. About an hour later she awoke crying. I figured her pacifier fell out of her mouth so I told my sister to just put her back down.
Two and a half hous later, I went upstairs to go and get her up. I called her name as usual and she did not move. I called it again and touched her shoulder. She just flopped over on to her back. When I picked her up she was unresponsive with her whole body twitching and her eyes wide open. She was saturated with sweat and barely breathing. I yelled to my sister that something was wrong with the baby and to call 911. The next thing I did was run outside in my stocking feet with her draped on my shoulder in the snow to go out and find my father. When I found him I handed her off to him and ran in the backyard and just started screaming, "What's happening to my baby!" and, "God, please, not my baby!"
Meanwhile my sister is on with the 911 operator and I kept on screaming to my father, "Is she still breathing?" she was at this point.
When the ambulance arrived we were told it was just the after effects of having a febrile seizure and they were going to transport her to the local hospital. Her father and I followed the ambulance to the hospital where the nurse said her temprature was up to 105.8 degrees and they were going to med-flight her to Boston. In Boston, she continued to have seizures for over 36 hours straight and everything went down hill from there.
Eventually her blood pressure continued to drop and they needed heat lamps to keep her temprature near normal.
Her brain eventually shut down and al her organs began to fail.
On February 17th 2000, our baby, our little princess passed on at approximately 1 o'clock in th afternoon. Throughout her hospital stay and up through the present no one knows what happened. All her blood tests and other varios tests in the hospital came up negative of any sort of virus, infection,illness, you name it.
What makes this so hard for us on top of everything else is to know how smart this child was and not only to have her die, but for her to die because the seizures caused her to become brain dead.
Thank you for allowing me to tell my story. My grieving has just begun, but with every chance I get to talk about her life and death, it gets this awful weight off my chest. I have attached a picture of my beautiful daughter, so hopefully, the whole world may get a chance to see my little slice of Heaven.
Susanna Richardson
