Oct. 31, 2013: Diagnosis

As an athletic trainer, Cade knows all about the human body and what happens when it fails. But when he was working at a football game on Halloween 2013, he wasn’t thinking about the athletes’ sprained ankles and concussions. Cade’s mind kept wandering back to his baby. 

An earlier ultrasound showed abnormal results, so before the game Cade sat through a two-hour sonogram with Brooke, who was 20 weeks pregnant with Miles. He was now waiting to hear the results. 

“I helped the athletes,” Cade said. “I was there for them without letting them see what was really going on, but that was a hard game to work.”

After the game, Brooke told him that Miles had a rare heart defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome, meaning the left side of his heart didn’t develop. He also had heterotaxy, a condition that caused his organs to be on the wrong side of his body.

Although Cade understood the anatomy behind it, the future was unknown, which is what scared him the most. 

“That was a hard time, trying to deal with ‘What do we do?’” Cade said. “You find out about these conditions, and then the more you try to research on your own, the more bad news you hear on the internet.”