TOLEDO, OH (Toledo News Now) - Chad and Amber Bingley will be married six years this August. It was 4 years ago in July when, expecting their first child, something happened.
Amber had been sick for much of the early pregnancy but the nausea was controlled. Then the week after July 4, not feeling well, she called her doctors, who send her to the hospital.
The news she got there shocked her.
"[The doctors told me] 'unfortunately, you are in active labor and I'm already half-way there. So we're going to do everything we can to get labor stopped.' They were able to stop my labor and transport me by life-flight to St. V's," said Amber.
The goal was to extend her 27 week pregnancy by 1 week.
"Unfortunately, the following day, we were able to give birth to our son," said Amber.
They named him Cameron. The slight bleed in his brain wasn't so unusual for someone born so early. X-rays, though, turned up a heart murmur.
That meant a trip to Ann Arbor for surgery, which went well. But the little guy developed an infection which led to seizures.
"By the time we got this all figured out he was having fifty to sixty seizures a day," said Amber.
More pictures of the baby boy's brain were ordered.
"By that time we had realized that his bleed had significantly increased. From there his life kinda went downhill from there," said Amber.
"On August 12, 2011 he ended up passing away," said Chad.
A 31 day fight for life was over, leaving questions.
"Just don't know why. You get an empty feeling trying to figure out why it all happened," said Chad.
Neither Chad nor Amber swore off ever having children again, but not yet. They needed to grieve. They needed to heal.
When they felt it was time, they became pregnant again.
Amber still had sickness but nothing like her first time. Given the couple's history, doctors were watching Amber closely. It's a good thing they were.
"They noticed ... just a couple of weeks right after we found out we were having a girl, they noticed that she started to dilate," said Chad.
Was this their earlier nightmare about to be re-lived? No one would blame the young couple for fearing that.
"We didn't know for sure what was going on. The thought did cross my mind that 'oh no, this is the same story as before," said Chad.
A surgical procedure would stop the dilation, keeping the baby inside.
On May 21 of 2013, little Kyra was born. The happy story, though, would still have to wait.
"To our surprise, everything wasn't OK," said Amber.
"We noticed she wasn't really breathing right. We noticed kind of a wheeze every time she'd take a breath and she couldn't really calm down," said Chad.
Doctors said they'd need to send the newborn out. Both Amber and Chad had seen and felt this before.
"That was probably about midnight or so that night that the life flight chopper came in and it kind of hit me like 'why is this happening again?'. That tore me up pretty good that night, didn't really sleep a whole lot," said Chad.
Seeing a silver lining in the middle of the night can seem impossible, but Chad and Amber had stayed in touch with a couple of Cameron's nurses from two years earlier.
"So I was able to call them and to our surprise, one of them actually was going to be Kyra's nurse," said Amber.
The diagnosis was gestational pneumonia. Two weeks of pretty intense anti-biotic therapy knocked it out. With Kyra's second birthday approaching in May, the couple can now see the happy ending.
The emotional swings for a young couple have been more than most of us feel in a lifetime. With them through it all was the medical staff at Mercy Children's Hospital.
"Even to this day we'll give 'em a call, send 'em cards, send them pictures in the mail, keep them updated. We make frequent visits," said Amber.
"The facility and the treatment center they have there at the NICU is unreal," said Chad.
