Medical Help for Maizie Mae the Amazing

Hello my name is Trevor Alexander and I am writing this asking for help for my daughter Maizie. This is difficult because asking for help is not in my nature. I'm placing that aside though because this request is not to help myself or my wife but to help our daughter. Jess and I discovered the wonderful news that we were pregnant with our first child, a little girl, earlier this year and we decided to name her Maizie Mae Alexander. At our 20-week mark, we had an anatomy ultrasound done. This is when our world was turned upside down. We found out that Maizie's cells didn't communicate properly so her body didn't form normally. She has a very rare condition, literally 1 in a million, called ectopic cordis where her chest didn't fully develop, and her heart is on the outside of her body. We were told by our local hospital here in Spokane, Washington that there was no hope and we should either consider early termination or palliative care.

We both felt inside ourselves that these were not the options we should be taking with our child. Jess and I were not convinced this hospital could even handle her condition, so we started looking elsewhere. We drove to Seattle Children's Hospital where we met with a Pediatric Cardiology team and had an Echocardiogram done. The Echo showed that on top of her heart and chest complications, she also has a complex heart defect. The arteries that go into her ventricles were not in the right spot which was leading to her left ventricle being underdeveloped. They too offered us no treatment options and left us to dread the possibility of our little girl not knowing or seeing this world for long once she was born. Still, hope was not lost within us. Maizie seemed to be telling us not to give up, what with all of her flipping and punching and kicking. We hadn’t even made the connection that her initials are MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) until we started seeing her punching the ultrasound wands each time we’d get one done. We knew she was our little fighter but lo and behold her name even foretold it. God told us to keep pushing and fighting for Maizie. We did, and we are.

Gratefully, with the help of family, we were able to get a second opinion from the Cleveland Clinic. We met virtually with a new Pediatric Cardiologist who not only has seen and treated both of our baby, Maizie Mae’s, heart conditions but has had success with surviving children who were also diagnosed with both conditions. She is very confident that she can help our baby even though the road will be difficult. We will be traveling to Cleveland, Ohio for them to take over our care in the next couple of weeks. In order to help her, they will first place her on a medication that will open up her arteries for better blood flow when she is born. From there they will complete some in-depth scans to better understand her anatomy and to come up with a plan of action to treat her and give her a life full of possibilities. She will need a series of three surgeries to help correct these issues and will be hospitalized for a minimum of 3-5 months after she is born. They believe they can not only fix her heart without needing a transplant but that they can place her heart back into her chest, as well as make her a new chest covering to protect her as she grows. The other surviving children have become quite an inspiration and point of hope for us lately. These doctors at Cleveland Clinic are real-life superheroes and we are so grateful that they want to work at giving our baby a life.

All of the care she will need, even if insurance will agree to assist with it, will be very expensive. We never could have imagined that she would need so much to come into this world but she deserves the very best from us and we want to give it to her. God has a plan for Maizie, and we are going to put in any work we must in order to help her become what she is meant to be. Jess, Lobo (her big canine brother) and I are asking for any help we can get towards her medical expenses so that we can give her this chance. Please help my family in any way you can, be it prayers, thoughts, or donations towards her medical costs. We truly appreciate you sharing with anyone you know so that we can get as much help for Maizie as possible. We pray for our little fighter every day and we know in our hearts she is truly meant for greatness. Please help us bring her into this world with the best medical care she can get.

You can keep up with Maizie Mae’s amazing progress on FaceBook by clicking the following link or searching for MaizieStrong