16 minute read
CHRISTMAS FIRSTS
Advertisement
LIVING
good tidings
health and happiness A baby comes home p. 58
blended traditions two religions, one celebration p. 62
love at the walking track first holiday together p. 62
a family reunited from iraq to canada p. 63
CHRISTMAS STORIES | HOLIDAYGIFT GUIDE
Christmas Firsts
These people may have different backgrounds, different struggles and different traditions but, as their stories show, it’s being together that makes the holidays feel special and new.
Charlie and Karen hold a 3D model of Charlie’s heart (left)—a technological wonder that allowed the doctor to plan and practise the baby’s life-saving surgery.
Every child is a gift, but for the Lefave family, finally bringing home their baby was more than a blessing— it was a modern-day miracle.
BY JILL BUCHNER
Karen Lefave was at her 12-week ultrasound appointment when she learned the news. The technician pointed out two little hearts beating on the monitor: She was having twins. “It was the best moment, but I was nervous, of course,” she recalls. They called her husband, Greg, who was waiting in the hallway, into the room, and Karen watched his jaw drop and a big grin spread across his face. “It was the happiest moment of his life,” she says.
The mood changed dramatically three days later, when the Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., couple learned that Karen might be carrying a set of rare and high-risk monochorionic-monoamniotic twins—two babies sharing one placenta and one amniotic sac. In this type of pregnancy, there is a major risk of cord entanglement, and babies have only a 50 percent chance of surviving to 24 weeks. Karen and Greg got on a plane to Toronto to confirm the results at Mount Sinai Hospital.
An ultrasound of Karen’s uterus showed two fetuses, unseparated in the womb with a knot at the umbilical-cord base and the two cords twisted around each other all the way down to the tiny abdomens. It also showed something else: One of the fetuses had a misshapen heart. Doctors at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) eventually found that the main arteries had developed on the reversed sides, there was a hole in the heart and the pulmonary artery was severely blocked. Without major surgery, the baby would likely die within a year.
Karen and Greg were terrified, but they couldn’t let their worry consume them. “We just thought we would find out everything we could to get them here,” says Karen.
On April 20, 2014, 26 weeks into the pregnancy, Karen moved to Toronto to be monitored at Mount Sinai, with three ultrasounds a week and four stress tests a day to check for cord entanglement. The rest of the time, she waited.
Though a regular pregnancy is about 40 weeks, monochorionic-monoamniotic twins are typically delivered around the 32- to 34-week mark because their shared placenta and amniotic sac make remaining in utero so risky. But the cardiologist monitoring Karen knew that a premature baby would have a lower chance of surviving a heart defect, and life-saving surgery wouldn’t be possible until the infant weighed 5½ pounds. So if Karen delivered early with a planned caesarean section, one of her babies would be in danger; if she delivered later, they would both be at increased risk from the cords. Added to this risk was the fact that the baby without the heart defect had been diagnosed with ventriculomegaly, an enlargement of the brain’s ventricles that could worsen the longer she was in utero. It was an impossible choice. Karen and Greg scheduled
Despite the whole stressful ordeal, Karen says she wouldn’t trade any of it for the world.
a meeting with her prenatal specialist and her cardiologist to make a decision.
But, on May 25—the morning of the meeting and 31 weeks into the pregnancy— Karen’s water broke. Within an hour, she gave birth to a healthy (though premature) baby girl they named Georgia, and a baby girl with a potentially fatal flaw in her heart, Charlize (Charlie for short), who was born blue. Both of the newborns were rushed away immediately. Georgia was taken to the neonatal intensive care unit at Mount Sinai, while Charlie was sent to nearby SickKids, where she was given a drug to make her heart work until she could grow big enough for surgery.
For two months, Karen was back and forth between hospitals, never holding her daughters for long. Each of the twins was hooked up to tubes, and no one knew when Charlie’s heart would be fixed. Karen recorded the day-to-day struggles on a Facebook page she called “The Twinkies” to inform concerned family and friends about the girls’ development.
Finally, when Georgia was released on July 26, Karen found a glimmer of hope. She and Greg took Georgia straight to SickKids and laid her next to Charlie. “Charlie was incubated, but under her mask, she started smiling,” says Karen. “And Georgia cuddled into her and smiled, too. It was the coolest thing.” It wasn’t just Karen and Greg who needed Charlie to get better; her twin needed her as well. “We started to feel like a family.”
Less than two weeks later, on Aug. 5, Charlie was finally ready for surgery. At 5½ pounds, 10-week-old Charlie had her chest opened up and a shunt inserted. Her surgeon, Dr. Glen Van Arsdell, head of cardiovascular surgery at SickKids, saw her tiny heart was too thick to be repaired (a dangerous side-effect of the flaw that makes it difficult for the heart to fill with blood), but he could at least buy her time until it was strong enough for a more major operation. By mid-September, Charlie, Georgia and Karen were moving back to Sault Ste. Marie. They were finally getting the newborn experience in their own home, but it didn’t feel quite right. Charlie had a feeding tube and she wasn’t lifting her head. “We didn’t know what was going to happen or when her next surgery was going to be,” says Karen. “We were very much on pause.” As Christmas approached, Karen wanted to celebrate, but the weight of Charlie’s unknown future made it difficult to enjoy the holiday. “I was happy because we were home, but everything was so different from what I had anticipated.”
The new year arrived and, soon after, so did news of Charlie’s surgery. Charlie had put on some weight, and Dr. Van Arsdell used an MRI to make 3D models of her heart to plan his strategy for rebuilding the unusually shaped organ.
Karen had been through months of talking with doctors, nurses and specialists, so she knew the myriad ways the surgery could go wrong. “Then, that morning came where all those risks you were warned about were real,” she says. “We spent an hour or so cuddling Charlie, trying to fight back the tears so she wouldn’t sense our helplessness. Then, a man walked in and asked us to pass him our daughter, and we did, not knowing if we’d see her alive again.”
In the first surgery, Dr. Van Arsdell had needed to make the hole in Charlie’s tiny heart bigger. Now, to fully fix the organ, he would need to core out her arteries from what was left of her heart and relocate them on the opposite sides—and hopefully do it all without cutting out the heart’s electrical system that makes it beat. No one knew if this would be possible or if Charlie would simply get another short-term solution; it all depended on her heart.
Karen and Greg waited for six hours before their cardiologist, Dr. Fraser Golding, finally emerged. The surgery had successfully fixed her heart. Greg broke down with tears of happiness. “It was a moment I will never forget for as long as I live,” says Karen. “Our precious little girl was given a second chance at life and the opportunity to grow and bond with her twin sister.”
Now, Karen is looking forward to her first Christmas with her two healthy girls. “Our babies are now walking, silly, babbling toddlers.” She twists one of the red curls at the nape of Charlie’s neck around her finger and muses about the twins running around and opening presents on Christmas morning. One of those presents is going to be a scrapbook based on Karen’s online entries. “When I look back on it, I have no idea how I did it,” she says. “Sure, it sucks that I didn’t get to know what a normal pregnancy is like, but look what I have now. And I’ve got so many stories to tell them about what they overcame to get here— I wouldn’t trade that.”
th GUEST EDITOR
“Getting to travel and to see the world—it makes the world a smaller place. Forty-six countries this year; I was literally eight times around the world and the thing that it gives me is this wonderful perspective on knowing how lucky we are to live in a country that’s this great, that’s this safe and secure.” — Michael Bublé (left, with wife, Luisana Lopilato, and their son, Noah)
How can a Jewish girl and a Christmas-crazy boy make it through the holiday season? By blending the best of their own traditions for a customized celebration.
BY JENNIFER GOLDBERG
Growing up, I was never interested in Christmas. As a Jewish kid living in a Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto, I didn’t know anyone who celebrated North America’s biggest holiday. Christmas was tangential—an elaborate, sparkly backdrop for the winter season. Even as I ventured outside my insular Jewish community and made friends who adored Christmas, the holiday remained in my peripheral vision. That is, until I started dating Dawson.
I fell hard for the sweet, generous redhead from Kingston, Ont. I loved his charming, easygoing nature, which came complete with an enduring love of childhood Christmas traditions. When Dawson asked me to join his family for our first holiday season together, I didn’t think twice. I’d seen A Christmas Story, and I knew all the words to “Jingle Bell Rock.” I was prepared to do the Christmas thing. Or so I thought.
Dawson’s family welcomed me warmly. I awoke on my first Christmas morning to my own overstuffed stocking and a scavenger hunt for our presents. I loved the coziness of sitting around the tree, tearing open packages and sharing memories. But after the gifts and the Bailey’sspiked coffee, I began to feel homesick for my own family’s alternative Dec. 25 tradition of going to the movies and joining other Jewish families for Chinese food. And I discovered, much to Dawson’s chagrin, that I disliked turkey dinner. Beyond that, I was concerned that if Dawson and I got more serious, the bright twinkly lights and loud carols would overshadow my Jewish holiday customs.
When Dawson and I moved in together, he brought along his collection of muchloved tree ornaments. He asked that we buy a small tree for our first holiday in our new apartment, and I hesitated. Christmas decorations in our home seemed like the first step toward losing my Jewish identity. He understood, and when he brought home a little artificial tree, he set it up on a table beside my great-grandmother’s menorah.
Dawson and Jennifer introduce their daughter, Maytal, to her first Chrismukkah celebration.
Thus began our own celebration of Chrismukkah. We adopted the pop-culture term because it perfectly describes the hybrid Christmas/Hanukkah traditions we’ve created together. I taught Dawson to play dreidel; he took me to midnight mass. I make Hanukkah jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot; he bakes his mother’s shortbread cookies. Together, we’ve found a balance that makes holiday time extra special.
Last holiday season, we introduced our newborn daughter, Maytal, to her first Chrismukkah celebration. With both of our families gathered at our house, we trimmed the tree, lit the menorah and gobbled up a feast that included my mother’s latkes. I even let Dawson have his traditional turkey with all the trimmings.
This season, our daughter will be 14 months old when Santa comes to town. I still worry that, for her, Christmas will outsparkle the comparatively sedate Hanukkah. But I can’t wait to introduce her to Chrismukkah traditions she’ll be able to call her own.
How a couple of seniors found love at an indoor walking track.
BY LYNNE TURNER
However Kay Ayres and Don Yake celebrate the holidays this year, you can bet that walking will be part of it.
It was, after all, at an indoor walking track where the two seniors met three years ago. Although 66-year-old Kay says she wasn’t expecting to meet anyone at the track, she admits she couldn’t help but notice Don, “the nice-looking man who was recently widowed.” Don lost his wife of 50 years to cancer in 2011.
Kay and Don, who’s now 78, started walking together every day. During one such walk, Don asked Kay out to lunch. “The second-hardest decision in my life was to take the chance and go out with Don,” says Kay, who adds that the hardest was putting her late husband in care back in 2008 before losing him to Alzheimer’s disease in 2012. “How dare I think about moving on with my life?”
She did more than think about moving on. Lunch became dinner, and the couple found themselves spending more and more time together—on and off the track. Then, last spring, as the couple was walking hand in hand around the track, Don announced that he wanted to make sure Kay was happy and that he wanted her to be his wife. Kay, who hadn’t expected a marriage proposal, was thrilled with the idea.
Their wedding this past August was held, appropriately enough, at the walking track, with Kay’s 91-year-old mother, Margaret Olliff, as matron of honour,
Sharing the warm glow of Christmas lights with his wife, Amina, and their son helped Omar feel more connected to the holiday celebrations.
on track—whether celebrating Christmas (above) or walking hand in hand at their summer wedding (right).
A new Canadian family embraces Christmas traditions— and their community embraces them back.
BY TERESA PITMAN
Last year, Omar Ahmed buckled his wife, Amina Al-Bakri, and their three-month-old son, Zack, into the family car and drove around their Guelph, Ont., neighbourhood, marvelling at the holiday lights and decorations on people’s lawns. “The whiteness of the snow reflecting the coloured lights is just amazing,” says Omar. There is nothing like that in Iraq, the country they’d left to immigrate to Canada.
And being able to share the experience with his wife and son was a big improvement over Omar’s first Christmas in Canada six years earlier, when he was a single, newly arrived PhD student at the University of Guelph. He’d spent that day alone, missing his family and friends back home.
Despite that experience, Omar quickly came to appreciate the safety and security of Canada, instead of the ongoing battles in Iraq. Mosul, the town where he and Amina lived until Omar left to set up their life in Canada in 2008, is now under ISIS control. (Amina joined him in April 2014, and Zack was born five months later.) They still worry about family left behind.
These days, Omar is a faculty member in the University of Guelph’s engineering department, and Canada feels like home— a place where he and his young family have been made to feel welcome and where Christmas has become a time to look forward to. Because they’re Muslim, the family doesn’t celebrate Christmas in a religious way, but they’ve learned to enjoy some of the traditions, including exchanging gifts.
“When you are new to a community, you don’t quite know what to do,” says Omar. “But the Canadians we met would give us gifts, and so we gave gifts back. I think it increases the sense of community, giving to each other.”
Their circle of friends is diverse. “Many of my friends are Christians, and they will invite us for holiday dinners,” he says, adding that they check with him to ensure that the food meets Muslim dietary restrictions. “One friend mentioned he’d left the wine out of the sauce on the fish so we could eat it.” It means a lot to the couple that their friends make the effort to include them.
This year, Zack is an active toddler, and Omar looks forward to showing him the lights again and watching him unwrap his gifts. “I think it will be exciting for him. The lights, to me, are another example of community. People put them up not only for themselves but also so other people can see them, and it makes them happy.”
Omar’s least favourite part of the holiday: the weather. “I know that after Christmas, the real winter weather comes,” he says. “I like it when the first snow comes—it’s beautiful—but then, it keeps snowing and snowing, and you want to say, ‘Just go away.’” Sounds like a typical Canadian.
and Don’s 52-year-old son, Dan, as best man. The ceremony concluded with Don and Kay, wearing “Just Married” signs on theirbacks,leadingweddingguests around the track.
This Christmas, Kay, who never had children of her own, will enjoy being part of Don’s large holiday gathering that includes his three children and their spouses as well as six grandchildren. And the couple will enjoy the wedding gift Don’s brothers gave them back in the summer: a trip to Niagara Falls to take in the Christmas lights as a couple. Which they plan to do, as they walk together, hand in hand.
