Eleven years after a 27-week delivery, Anna’s working the Children’s Miracle Network radiothon phone bank. Here’s what the final push pays for.
The room was quiet when Anna Whetham’s daughter was born.
Anna had spent months waiting to hear her baby cry. When the moment came, there was no sound. Her daughter’s lungs hadn’t finished growing. The team grabbed the baby, ran her down the hall to the NICU, and Anna lay there in the recovery silence with no idea what came next.
That was eleven years ago. If you met her daughter today, you’d see a regular eleven-year-old. Running around. Doing kid stuff. You wouldn’t know any of this happened to her.
Children’s Miracle Network is the reason that delivery room and that eleven-year-old can exist on the same timeline. Right now, with two hours left in the radiothon, your donation is what funds the next one.
A pregnancy that turned dangerous fast
Anna was twenty-five and twenty-seven weeks pregnant with her first child. She woke up in the middle of the night with a terrible burning pain in her stomach. The hospital ran tests the next day. Things kept getting worse.
By the time the results came back, she had severe preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome. Her blood pressure was climbing. Her platelet count was dropping. Her liver was close to rupturing, which was the pain she’d been feeling all along. The pregnancy had become toxic to her body, and her daughter’s body was shutting down right alongside hers.
They induced labor immediately. The NICU team came in to walk Anna and her husband through what a twenty-seven-week delivery actually looks like. They gave her shots to help the baby’s lungs along, hoping for a little more time. Then the contractions started. The baby’s heart rate dropped. Her breathing dipped. There was no time left. They rushed Anna into the operating room for a C-section.
Tuesday to Saturday
The baby was born on a Tuesday. Anna held her for the first time on Saturday.
For four days, she could only look through plastic. The next chance to hold her daughter was a full week after that, and only because she and her husband had to take turns. One parent at a time. Then back to standing watch.
Sixty days in the NICU. Two months of driving to the hospital, going to work, coming back, sleeping a little, doing it again. Anna talks openly about the fear of those weeks. She knows other parents in Rapid City are walking through the same thing this afternoon and they need to hear somebody say it out loud.
The local piece
Anna and her husband could both drive in every single day. For families two or three hours out, that’s a different equation, choosing between a paycheck and a baby, packing up and moving closer to a bigger city for two months, hoping the job’s still there at the end of it.
Rapid City has a NICU with the right equipment, the right specialists, and the right space for a twenty-seven-week preemie to grow into a kid who rides her bike around the cul-de-sac. That kind of care isn’t standard in rural America. It exists here because of people who keep funding it.
Children’s Miracle Network dollars are how that NICU keeps up with itself. Anna’s been around long enough to watch the gear change. New monitors. New incubators. New tools that didn’t exist when her daughter was born. Every year, a little more of what a fragile baby needs ends up in the Black Hills instead of a few states away.
She told us on the air that she didn’t expect any of this when she got pregnant. Nobody plans for HELLP syndrome. Nobody plans for a delivery room with no crying in it. You plan for a normal pregnancy, a regular hospital stay, and a baby you take home in three days. The point of a place like this is being ready when the plan goes sideways.
What the last two hours look like
The radiothon ends at six o’clock. Anna is on the phones until then.
If you’ve been meaning to give and the day got away from you, this is the window. The phones are ringing and Anna is sitting at one of them because she knows what it feels like to be the parent on the other end of a NICU monitor.
A lot of donations in the final stretch are small ones. Twenty bucks. Fifty. A couple hundred from somebody whose own kid spent time at the hospital. They add up fast. The equipment in that NICU exists because thousands of people in the Black Hills decided ten dollars was worth giving up.
Call 605-755-9199 to donate by phone. Text BH4KIDS to 34984 to give that way.
Why this one story
Anna’s daughter is alive and eleven years old because the silent delivery room she was born into was followed by sixty days in a NICU with the equipment to keep her there. Most parents who end up in that NICU got there with no warning at all. A regular pregnancy, a regular checkup schedule, and then one afternoon that ends in a place they’d never planned to be.
A donation in the next two hours funds whatever shows up next. The next quiet delivery. The next family driving in every day. The next eleven-year-old who’s running around her backyard because somebody picked up the phone this afternoon.
Anna already did her part. She had the baby, lived through the NICU, and came back today to sit at the phone bank for the next family who’s about to walk in.
