Our feature Mother with week is an incredibly strong and courageous woman called Lara Cotten. Lara gave birth to premature triplets at 28 weeks and has gone through incredible hardships health wise with one of her children. Lara herself developed a rare neuro immune disease. Lara’s attitude and determination is admirable and I am truly humbled by all that she has achieved and been through . Read on to learn more about this remarkable woman. Thank you Lara for being so real . I am sure you will inspire many many people, I know you inspired me! If you would like to contact Lara send her a note on FB messenger telling her you read my blog and she will get back to you.
Thank you Lara for sharing your story with us!
1.How many children do you have, name and ages
My husband and I have triplets who turned 23 this past December (2019). We have Ryan, Julia and Mason. We do not have any other children.
2.What is your current occupation?
I am considered disabled at this time and have been since the end of 2017. I have a rare neuro-immune disease called transverse myelitis. There is no cure for my condition. It is similar to having a spinal cord injury in my cervical spinal cord. Prior to becoming disabled, I worked as an educational diagnostician for over 20 years in the Texas school system. My job was to evaluate school children ages 3 through 21 of suspected disabilities and serve as a case manager for over 100 students every year. I loved my job. I quit my job when my children were born in December of 1996 and went back to work in August of 1998 when the children were about 20 months old.
3.What are the challenges of balancing work and parenting?
I should tell you about our triplets and their early life before answering this question. Our children were born at 28 weeks each weighing 1 lb 12 oz. I had six weeks of bed rest in the hospital before they were born. I was put into intensive care twice to stop early labor. My water broke in the middle of the night and the nurse said, “Call your husband and tell him to get up here because these babies are coming.”
All went as expected for the first week or two with preemies in NICU. If you have not lived through the experience of walking into a minimal stimulation setting in the NICU with three infants weighing 795 grams each, you can’t imagine it. Luckily, I had made a friend while on bed rest in the hospital who was also expecting triplets and we shared a room for the last few weeks and her babies were born two weeks before mine at a similar weight and her babies were doing well, so I had hopes ours would do as well.
Our son Ryan, triplet number 1, developed a rare condition called tracheomalacia. It is a condition in which the trachea is not strong and it collapses with every breath. Usually, doing a tracheostomy is the first thing to do when a person develops this condition but our son did not weigh enough to do the procedure for several weeks which means he spent 13 weeks on a ventilator. He weighed approximately 3 lbs 10 oz when his surgery was completed. He came home two weeks later. Taking care of a child with a tracheostomy is very challenging, especially when they also have a diagnosis of chronic lung disease. Ryan required a full-time nurse in our home for 10 months (from 8 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday). You would think that would sound wonderful, and I could not have managed without our nurse, but it adds to the stress level of your home with extra people in the house all of the time.
All three of our children required breathing treatments and CPT (chest physical therapy) every three hours when they came home from the hospital and they had to be fed every three hours as well. Julia and Mason came home at 11 weeks and Ryan came home 4 weeks later. Julia and Mason developed without any complications but Ryan struggled to gain weight. His doctor said that Ryan was breathing like he was doing aerobics all day long and breathing through a coffee straw. I should add that when Ryan was in NICU, he had several near death experiences and episodes with lack of oxygen to the brain. After coming home from NICU, he went right back to the hospital into Pedi ICU – I can’t remember why at this time. But he was a frequent visitor to Pedi ICU between age 15 weeks and 20 months.
At one year, Ryan weighed 10 lbs. His brother weighed 13 lbs and his sister weighed 18 lbs. After Christmas of 1997, he had his tracheostomy removed and he was able to breathe without his trachea collapsing! He did well, but his trachea was still very narrow so he still had trouble breathing easily and therefore had trouble gaining weight. In October 1998, he had a surgery to insert a feeding tube and also a procedure called fundoplication which helped to significantly reduce reflux which was a big problem for Ryan.
After this surgery, it was smooth sailing for all of our children. Julia and Mason had to go in occasionally for small concerns, but Ryan only had to go in for check-ups and he didn’t go back to the doctor for a sick visit until he was nine years old and he had the flu!
From the time Ryan was born until the time he had his feeding tube put in, his medical costs totaled one million dollars. Fortunately, we had good insurance and the children qualified as disabled due to their low birth weight and Medicaid picked up the rest of the expenses while in NICU. Ryan continued to qualify for Medicaid due to his disability (health issues) and his expenses were covered, even our nurse. He was unable to digest breast milk so he had to have a very expensive formula and that was covered by Medicaid as well. We were even eligible for a special program call MDCP (Medically Dependent Children Program) that helped provide for additional things Ryan needed as he got older, including toys and gymnastics in a special developmental gymnastics program. Ryan was old enough to be in the class (mommy and me type class) but he was still crawling. He was the only crawler they had ever had in their program and he excelled. He did not like physical therapy time but he loved gymnastics so he was dismissed from physical therapy.
So, you can imagine how all of this affected my work, especially in the first few years of the triplet’s lives. Luckily, I had a tremendous amount of family support during the first two and a half years. I could have never, ever made it through the days and nights without them. I tried to manage the nights most of the time on my own, but during the days, I had as much help as I needed. Not a one of my children went without attention. I went back to work when they were a year and eight months and my sister who was a college student at the time, watched them during the day, four days a week, and went to school at night. I only worked four days a week that first year. It went without a hitch except for when my son had to have his feeding tube surgery and I took two weeks off.
We then moved an hour away due to my husband’s job and things became a lot harder. The the kids were two and a half at that time. I really struggled with finding appropriate child care for my children because Ryan had his feeding tube and still required breathing treatments. It was a mish-mash of combinations of this and that to get them taken care of. Ryan qualified for another special program and it helped provide child care as long as a CNA was taking care of him. In a small town, that’s a hard thing to find. But we found someone… who I realize now was of questionable character… but we got through those years okay. It was a real challenge!
Probably one of the most difficult things, early on, was managing my husband’s career as a high school coach and his goals and the requirements of that job, and managing what we needed as a family. In the spring of 1999, I put my foot down and said, “This it IT!!! We are either moving back to where my family was or we are moving to another city where there are a lot of resources and some family! I had a job offer in this bigger town (educational diagnostician in McKinney, TX).” My husband knew I meant it because I didn’t speak to him AT ALL for 2 weeks until he faced the facts. He knew things were not going well where we were and our marriage was falling apart. He agreed to move back to where we had moved from and things got better. He had to step down as a varsity coach and go to middle school which was not what he wanted to do. But, I needed his help!!! He had done a poor job of helping me when we lived in the smaller town and it was time for him to step up. We had marriage issues for about 10 to 12 years related to parenting. We had to go to counseling twice and our church had to get involved (ugly story) before we finally got things on the right track.
(so glad you worked things out!! What an incredible ordeal you have gone through!)
On our twentieth anniversary as we were driving across the state of Texas on a way home from a funeral, he apologized to me (in the car). He acknowledged how hard life had been for me and he said he would change. And he did. It took another two years or so, but we have been married almost 29 years now and we have a wonderful marriage. He was always trustworthy and extremely hard working, but parenting was not on his list of priorities unless it involved sports.
I don’t know if I answered the question at all, but I just juggled work as the children got older as any mother of three children would. After school it was always driving from place to place as our children participated in all sorts of different activities because none of them wanted to do the same thing. Julia was a ballet dancer from age 3 to 19. Mason excelled in sports, particularly baseball and played center field in the state tournament his senior year and his dad was one of the coaches. Ryan excelled in band playing the saxophone of all things! It is amazing since he couldn’t breathe as a young child that he did so well in band despite still having to catch his breath more often than most other performers.
( That truly is remarkable achievement from Ryan!)
I want to add that with Ryan’s health problems as an infant, I can tell you many, many painful and joyous stories. There was an incident in day surgery when he was 13 months when he nearly died and he spent 17 days on a ventilator and a total of 30 days in Pedi ICU due to malpractice that we were unable to sue for. He came home from that hospital stay on chloral hydrate and methodone. It set him back developmentally by months – before he went into surgery he was just about to start crawling. When he came home, it was another 4 or 5 months before he started to crawl. He also had to have feeding therapy because he refused to have anything near his face due to intubated for so long and being under so much stress in Pedi ICU. (This was before his feeding tube was put in.)
His doctor told us when Ryan was about 5 years old and all the dust had finally settled from his crazy health journey… that we are so fortunate that Ryan is not severely disabled due to everything he went through as a child. He meant wheel chair bound, non-verbal, drooling for life. Ryan was slower to reach developmental milestones than his siblings and he had some difficulty with visual-spatial things in school but overall, he caught up with them. He is a very talented writer and he will graduate from West Texas A&M University with a degree in psychology and a minor in business and he is currently studying for the GRE for graduate school! I want to say that without our particular doctor, pediatrician, to care for Ryan, he would not be alive today. Our doctor is Dr. Rolf Habersang of Amarillo. If you have a child with special health issues, the choice of his or her doctor is crucial. We were blessed to have him as a doctor.
Julia is a student at Texas Tech University and she is majoring in Interior Design with minors in architecture and business. She will graduate in May 2021. Mason is a student at Texas A&M and will graduate this May (2020). He is studying public health and is busy interviewing at different physical therapy schools across Texas and in North Carolina.
4) What is your life philosophy?
I have a few but will keep it brief. God is a God of provision. Before I developed my illness, I was a “go for your dreams” type person and I have tried to instill that in my children. They all could have attended college within 15 minutes of our home at a great school but for Julia and Mason, they had goals that called them elsewhere and I encouraged them the whole way even though we have major financial limitations with my illness. If I had more energy myself, I would continue to go for my dreams but some days I am lucky to get out of bed so I count my blessings and am thankful.
5) What is a piece of advice you would give other mothers and what is one thing you wish you had known before having children?
I used to say “beware of fertility drugs because they work!!!” I had no idea we would have multiples. I felt like my husband and I would be lucky to have one baby with a round of fertility treatments. It took several for me to finally get pregnant. Motherhood came very easy to me. I am the oldest of four children and grew up around children most of my life. Caring for them was not an adjustment, it came very natural, as long I had enough support especially due to Ryan’s health.
I think the hardest thing in the parenting journey was our issues in our marriage. At one point I told my husband I was going to leave him and leave the kids with him because he needed to find out how demanding it was to work and take care of them at a young age and do everything (I mean everything) related to running the house. And I meant it. You have to mean it or it’s worthless. He improved some but for many, many years I was a nanny and a maid and an income producer but nothing else. One of the NICU nurses told us that we were at very high risk for divorce since my husband was a varsity coach, we had premature multiples and we had a child with very significant health issues. She wanted us to be aware of that so we would guard against divorce. We never discussed “divorce” but I would have left many, many days.
And I want to say one thing that may surprise those who read this, but I would stand in my bathroom in that small town and think about the best way to kill myself because I was so overwhelmed and unhappy. My stress impacted my job and I called my doctor one day and said, “If you don’t give me some medication, I am going to have to quit my job tomorrow.” So, he put me on something and it had a terrible effect on me. It made me feel like I was a little bit drunk or high all of the time, but in a good way. My personality changed significantly and it affected my driving. It also affected my job and I became careless with tasks that require a great amount of care. It was a disaster. However, I did not attribute these changes to my medication. I was kind of oblivious to it all. Once I realized what was happening, I got off the medication and things were better. I still had the life issues to deal with but I would warn everyone about issues with anti-depressants.
6) What is your greatest achievement apart from your child/children so far?
Getting through my own personal illness as best I can. Like I said earlier, I am a “go for your dreams” kind of person and would travel the world to reach my goals and learn more, but I have learned to understand that our value is not tied to our accomplishments. It has been an adjustment to settle for days in bed when my body demands it. I leave the house once or twice a week in a good week and that is only to run light errands for an hour or two. I used to walk and run 4 miles at at time, 4 times a week. Now, I can’t exercise. So, keeping my head up during this time has been an accomplishment. It is not good for my family that I have this disease so I try to manage the emotions that come with that. I am not the mother I want to be.
(but you are so much of an incredible role model to your children! You are strong and resilient)
There were four years that for my career I did something different than evaluate children in the school system. I was a scholarship program coordinator at a high school with mainly first generation college students applying to go to college. It was my job to supervise about 300 students every year and encourage them to do their best and “go for their dreams”. It was the perfect job for me. My husband mentioned that I made a tremendous impact on these students. I developed a good relationship with a student and when he was in college, I invited him to go to church with our family to a concert. He started going to church with us on a regular basis and after a year of attending church with us, he asked me to baptize him. That was a great honor. He was from Serbia and his mother spoke no English. His family was very poor. He ended up graduating from the local university and is now marketing director for the Amarillo Symphony. I can tell you many stories of children I was able to work with in that position and in which I was able to positively impacted their lives.
I also can tell you stories of the students that I have evaluated over the course of my career and I was able to help them as well. I was meant to work with students in a special capacity like this and no longer can but I am thankful for the time I did.
7) What have you done that you thought you could never do?
I am part of a network marketing company now that is excellent and within the first 3 months of working, I reached the top 10 in the world without even knowing there was such a rank. This is out of 40 countries. I reached up to number 3 in the world within the next month or two. This was a measure of growth rate, not income. I still work with this company but not diligently since I am not feeling well. I plan for 2020 to be a good year of growth, however.
8) What books do you /did you like reading to your children?
The most memorable since it was so long ago… Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.Reading it with my son Mason. We would get to the line, “SAAAAAAYYYY! I do like green eggs and ham!” And he and I would both stretch out that SAAAAAYYYY as long as we could and laugh.
In the kid’s senior annual I did a special page for them and wrote these two things…
The quote by Nelson Mandela… “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”Also, “As your parents we have learned an invaluable lesson – that the most overwhelmingly greatest challenge in your life can become your greatest joy and blessing that few will ever know. There are no adequate words to describe what you mean to us and how proud we are of each of you. Remember we love you, Mom and Dad.”
I hope that one day when you have grandchildren Lara that you can add Three Times the Fun to your list of books to read.
Would love to hear your story