Megan Kroff shares how she kept her faith having a child with a heart problem and Prader-Willi Syndrome as well as her personal struggles with anxiety and bipolar disorder.
Megan was born and raised in St. George, Utah but has also lived in Texas. She met and married the love of her life, Justin, while attending Dixie State College. While living in St. George, Megan gave birth to their special daughter, Sarah. It was a struggle to keep her alive and her birth sent them spiraling into the special needs world.
Next they had their son, Spencer. He too was a miracle. While she was pregnant with him, they found out he had cysts on his brain and we were told he could be born with Trisomy 18—he may not survive birth.
When Sarah turned 3 years old she was finally diagnosed with Prader-Willi Syndrome.
Megan and her husband Justin have experienced job loss, miscarriage, hurricanes, bed rest, and Megan was finally diagnosed with a soft form of bipolar, which explained her depression and anxiety/panic attacks. These challenges gave them opportunities to grow.
Megan and Justin are now living back in Utah where they are on the Board of Directors for the Utah Prader-Willi Syndrome Association. They love traveling together.
Megan loves being a mom more than anything in the world. Family is her passion. When she has alone time, she loves reading, Pilates, cooking, and organizing other people’s houses—no joke!
We begin Megan’s story with a normal first pregnancy. Sarah was about a week overdue, so the doctors decided to induce her. The induction went very quickly. Sarah was born an hour and a half after they started, which was very fast for a first baby. Sarah was born blue. Her APGAR scores were very low. She wasn’t breathing, and didn’t even cry when she was born. So, the nurses immediately whisked Sarah away down the hall to help her. Megan and her husband didn’t even get to see her.
They brought her back when she was pink and warm. When Megan went to breastfeed Sarah she didn’t have any kind of a sucking reflex or desire to eat. She was very weak. Sarah’s pediatrician seemed concerned she was so little and was losing weight.
Babies are often born with a hole in their heart which will close up when they cry. But Sarah’s wasn’t closing up. So the little hospital in St. George was communicating with Primary Children’s Hospital up in Salt Lake City about the hole in Sarah’s heart. After keeping Sarah for a week, they sent her home with an appointment up a Primary Children’s hospital.
Not long after they had been home, Megan was on the phone with the pediatrician setting up an appointment and Sarah turned bright blue. The nurse told her to bring her right into their office which was a block away. When they arrived the doctor grabbed her and the oxygen and got her breathing again. Their doctor was a man of great faith and he prayed with them. He decided they needed to drive up to Salt Lake City right then to see the cardiologist.
After getting Sarah stabilized they decided to do the 5 hour drive up to Salt Lake City instead of doing a life flight. They arrived at her sister’s house who lived a few blocks away from Primary Children’s hospital and started to eat. While they were eating Sarah’s oxygen levels began dropping, so they decided to take her to the Emergency Room.
This started the lowest low Megan had ever experienced. When they got Sarah to the hospital she was in heart failure. The doctors and nurses were frantically working on her and while Megan and Justin sat on the bed across from them watching them work on their daughter’s bare body. They sat and clung to each other as a Code Blue went off and more doctors rushed to the room.