To whom it may concern:

I have a survival story that includes a 23 month old angel whose name is Ciara. 

Ciara was born on 7-14-06.  After several months she was diagnosed with asthma.  Tying to get an infant to use an inhaler is tricky at best.  On 6-2-08 about 7:30pm my wife and I had given our daughter her nightly treatment with an inhaler.  I got up to put the inhaler away and heard I crash come from the front room.  I ran around the corner and there sat my precious angle covered in blood and yelling as loud as she could.  Ciara had pulled over a 20 gallon fish tank that had sand, sea shells from our wedding, and a tiny bear in a lounge chair over on her and it broke.  As I approached Ciara I saw her face cut severely.  Her left nostril had been severed completely, part of her upper lip cut off, her right eye cut and many other cuts.  I yelled to my wife to get our other daughter and get to the car.  We had a hospital less than 2 miles away.  I had my wife drive as I held my baby who would not stop bleeding.  I tried to hold her to comfort her but she was in tremendous pain.  As we got to Mercy Hospital I literally kicked the door in and started yelling for help.   The nurses and doctors help me clean her up.  Ciara had swallowed a lot of blood and she started to vomit from it.  I told the nurses not to let my wife in.  I had to take care of Ciara.  It was my job.  All Ciara wanted was daddy to hold her.  So I asked the hospital staff to give her some Tylenol and leave us alone until the plastic surgeon arrived.  The plastic surgeon was on call and it seemed to take an eternity to arrive, we lived in Nampa, ID at the time and it’s a small town of less than 100,000.  I started singing to my daughter (a song I sing to her now every day).  The song is “that’s my cupcake”.  It soothed her and she calmed down instantly. The hospital staff was amazed at how fast she relaxed when I sang to her.  I had sung it to her on the day she was born and she seemed to like it.  The plastic surgeon arrived and started to work.  He asked “what are your expectations?”  My reply was “make my baby beautiful again.  Just make her beautiful again.”  The doctor took a picture after my daughter was sedated.  When he was finished I asked what he thought the outcome would be.  He told me “we will just have to wait.  She has the worst case of facial lacerations I have seen.  How did this happen again?”  No one knows for sure but he estimated between 50-70 stitches…all in the face of a 23 month old.  He emailed the picture to me after we got her stitches out 4 weeks later.  I cry every time I see it.  My baby covered in blood, so innocent this should never have happened.  My wife hates that the doctor emailed me the photo.  I don’t know why I wanted it.  It’s truly a picture I want to forget but one that I somehow need to keep.  I cannot erase it even though it’s burned into my mind I for some reason I have to keep it.

It’s now been 8 ½ months since they day that changed our families life forever.  My angle is has been healing quite well. She still does not like it when strangers try to touch her face.  We tried to have her hair cut and she started crying.  She had the same reaction when we would take her to the doctor so he could look at her wounds and get her stitches removed.  Every so often just out of the blue she will say “daddy, a fish tank fell on me and hurt me.  I got a boo-boo on my lip.”  I cry when she says it.  We have had a couple of hard times since the accident.  A month and a half later I lost my job with a fortune 42 company then we lost our house and had to move.  But through it all Ciara is a rock.  Just earlier she seen that I was not feeling good and she sang the cupcake song to me.  We sometimes forget what matters…but when an angel sings to you it lets you know where your focus should be. 

Ciara’s scars are almost gone except the one on her lip.  The doctors tell us the scar may get better on its own.  They ask us “how do you think it looks?”  Unfortunately Boise, ID is not the Mecca of plastic surgeons.  My wife and I are with her every day and we cannot tell if there is progress.  We are just thankful that we did not lose our baby that night.  Ciara Schweigert is a survivor.