Bayou City Crossfit

Vic and the folks at Bayou City CrossFit continue to amaze me! Check out their latest post on www.bayoucitycrossfit.com. Our gratitude for what they're doing for Olivia and other kids in similar situations can't be expressed with words. We hope you'll consider participating!

From Bayou City's Website

Bayou City Crossfit will be hosting a fundraiser to benefit Texas Children’s Hospital in representation of Chad Stevens’ daughter Olivia. Olivia has an extremely rare chromosomal deletion and has been in and out of the hospital for the past 10 months. She has been a fighter going to therapy 7 days a week and getting better every day. Chad’s letter to the Bayou City Crossfit Community:

Bayou City CrossFit Community,

As some of you may know, my daughter Olivia was born almost 10 months ago. Olivia’s battle against adversity started before she was born. During my wife Leslie’s pregnancy, we found out Olivia was growing slower than most babies and were referred to a series of specialists associated with Texas Children’s Hospital. As a result of those visits, we learned that Olivia really looked like a normal baby, just smaller and with a few issues that we’d need to look into after she was born.

So the big day came! Olivia was born July 20 and weighed in at 3 pounds, 11 ounces. Right away, a team of neonatologists whisked Olivia away for evaluation. She had a blocked airway and wasn’t breathing. The blockage was cleared, Olivia met mom and she went straight to the Neonatal ICU at Texas Children’s.

After that, Olivia was watched 24×7 by the staff at Texas Children’s for 57 days.

Olivia’s first few days in the NICU were trying for the entire family, but mostly for her. Olivia had complete blood work done, an MRI of her head, an ultrasound of her head, an ultrasound of her heart, an echocardiogram of her heart, an ultrasound of her abdomen, x-rays of her lungs, and complete sequencing of her chromosomes.

I was completely overwhelmed by fear. These were literally the worst moments of my life, as the doctors told us that there was a chance that Olivia had a life threatening condition that she most likely wouldn’t survive. So I waited, and cried, and waited, and cried, and prayed, and prayed, and cried, and prayed, and prayed, and waited, and cried, and waited. Then, one by one, the tests came back, mostly positive! Olivia has an extremely rare chromosomal deletion, something that wouldn’t have been diagnosable a few years ago. That condition has resulted in minor issues, but nothing life threatening.

I’d be lying if I said that since Olivia came home that things have been “normal”. She has therapy 7 times a week and we’ve been back to Texas Children’s more times that I want to admit, but Olivia is getting better every day. She will undoubtedly wear glasses and hearing aids, and have to work a lot harder than the average child to learn, but she’s a fighter. Watching her fight through all of this hardship has been life changing; it’s so amazing what this little girl’s determination has taught us.

That’s were CrossFit makes its appearance in this story. After spending countless hours in the hospital and at work, I needed something to keep me from turning into a complete bowl of Jell-O and to work off a whole lot of stress. I showed up at the box knowing that I was going to get crushed by the workouts, but knew I needed to do it too. Then it happened, I became a CF addict and the community and Bayou City CrossFit pulled me in. Everyone that works out at a great box knows what I mean.

I look at Olivia’s fight and CrossFit and see so many similarities. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been going through a WOD completely exhausted and wanting to quit, only to think about Olivia’s fight and realize how much of a baby I’m being. This concept led to the birth of an idea Vic and I had about a CrossFit Fundraiser to benefit Texas Children’s Hospital.

This event, “Perseverance Through Hardship – 57 reps for TCH” will be held Saturday, June 26 starting at 9:00A.M at the Harriet and Joe Foster YMCA (1234 W. 34th). The event will cost participants $57 per team. This will be a battle buddy WOD, two people per team. There will be three divisions: female, male, and coed. This event consists of a timed WOD (8 exercises, 57 reps each) with prizes going to the top 3 finishers in standard and scaled groups. After the WOD, we’ll have food and beverages to celebrate the event. For those not competing, a donation would be greatly appreciated to help cover the expenses of the event, with any surplus going to Texas Children’s. The event will be held at the YMCA off of 34th and Ella. To register, contact Chad at csteven1@gmail.com or Vic at vic@bayoucitycrossfit.com. More information will be given after regionals.

Phoenix 2010 - Olivia's first plane ride and first dip in the pool!

Last week Chad, Olivia and I took a trip to Phoenix to visit his family, as now that she's off oxygen we can actually fly with her finally. She got to meet her Great Gramma for the first time, as well as Chad's Aunt Ann and Gil, and Uncle Don. We also got to see Gramma and Papa, who were there visiting from Pennsylvania. It was so much fun, especially because they had no idea we were coming. Chad did some excellent sleuthing to determine where exactly they were when we arrived in town, and it turns out we surprised Gramma, Papa and Uncle Don in the window treatments aisle at Home Depot...go figure! Needless to say they were shocked and a bit confused, but they quickly moved on to being thrilled, and I think it was approximately 1.3 seconds before Gramma scooped Olivia up and held her for the rest of our time there!

Olivia with Great Gramma

Olivia with Great Aunt Ann

Olivia with Daddy, Gramma and Papa

As for Olivia, she did great! We were so impressed with how well she traveled. I had been pretty worried that her ears might hurt her on the plane (mine sure always do), but she didn't seem to be bothered at all with the pressure changes. That was a relief. And she slept a good portion of both the flight there and the flight back. No horrible traveling with baby stories here! Just one sort of funny story though...On the way back home I took her to the bathroom on the plane to change her diaper, and somehow for a brief second she ended up on the changing table with no diaper underneath her (my mistake). Of course during that brief second she decided to pee all over the place! Her shirt was soaked, as was her back, the changing pad, and even some of her hair! This was a dilemma, as I didn't bring her diaper bag into the bathroom with me--just the bare necessities. I opened up the door to try and flag down a flight attendant to go get Chad for me, but none were around. Fortunately a really nice woman with a little boy waiting to use the bathroom offered to help, so she went to get Chad, who then brought over a clean outfit. After lots of mopping up and changing into a clean onesie, Olivia was a new woman! The best part was that she was smiling throughout the whole ordeal...I think she was pretty pleased with herself! I couldn't help but laugh. :-)

I guess I'm going sort of out of order here since I've already talked about the plane ride home, but while we were in Phoenix, we had a wonderful time. Lots of relaxing and just enjoying family time. I got a couple great spa treatments courtesy of Chad (for Mother's Day), and we had some good outdoors/pool time as well. The hotel grounds were beautiful, so we did lots of walking around exploring with Olivia.

One of the coolest parts of the trip was that we got to take Olivia in the pool for the first time! The first day we tried it she didn't seem too thrilled, but it was overcast so the water was not very warm. The second day the weather was much nicer so we tried again, and this time she seemed much happier. We got her submerged up to about her chest, and she seemed pretty interested--she was even kicking her legs around some underwater! Overall it was a good first introduction to the water. We figured she'd like it based on how much she enjoys splashing around during her baths! On our last night there we just hung out for a long time in this great outdoor area where people can eat, drink and listen to live music. Olivia was in a great mood and was just laughing and smiling the whole time while we relaxed and played with her. It was a perfect way to end our trip!

Chad's "black & white & color" masterpiece of Olivia, lovingly created on his iPhone on the plane ride home!

That's it for our trip, but here are a few more random pics from the last couple months, since I hadn't posted anything in a while!

Olivia's first Easter--doesn't she look beautiful in her frilly dress?

Easter bunny ears, courtesy of Aunt Lisa!

"Eating" her glasses...a favorite pastime when she pulls them down!

Being fawned over by Aunt Lisa, Papi and Honey on Mother's Day weekend...she was hamming it up for them and they were eating it up!

Staring at her awesome new overhead gym that Daddy made for her out of PVC pipe and random toys! (she's also enjoying her favorite toy, her finger, at the same time)

A better picture Olivia's new finger toy!

Here's a better picture of Olivia playing with her finger!

Back on oxygen, Back off oxygen

Little Olivia isn't so little anymore, she's up to 16 pounds and continues to grow and grow. A few weeks back she had a bit of a setback when some sort of ear / sinus infection caught up with her. It seemed like she was coughing up nastiness for about 2 weeks. Because she had stuff in her lungs for most of that time, her oxygen saturations went back down and we had to be her back on supplemental oxygen. While it sucked pretty badly, we took a little comfort in the fact that we knew that it was only temporary this time.

Over the last few weeks, Olivia's congestion has completely disappeared and she's back to being her healthy and very happy self again. One completely amazing development (that all parents experience) has been her discovering her mouth. One day Leslie and I were sitting in bed with her and she just started putting her finger in her mouth! While not exactly a cure for cancer, we were ecstatic. I bet we just sat there for an hour and watched. Since then, her mouth has become her favorite toy! Here's the best picture I have so far, I'm sure we'll get a better one soon.