Kara Price

That tiny baby is now a college freshman with a very successful first semester at Austin College under his belt.  Each year, we walk in the March for Babies, supporting March of Dimes research so that no other babies’ pictures look like the first one above.  Please support us in that walk by joining our team as a walker or as a donor by clicking http://www.marchforbabies.org/kaltenbaumer. 

When we reach out to you each year to ask for your support of Team Truman, we tell you the horrible story of Truman's birth 17 weeks early.  What we don’t often talk about is how the lifelong complications from that scary and heartbreaking entrance into the world didn't end when Truman came home from the NICU after 122 days.  Sometime between his third day and his third week, Truman suffered massive brain hemorrhaging—essentially three strokes—leaving him with cerebral palsy.  We don't know exactly what caused it.  It could have been heart surgery at six days of age.  It could simply have been because still-developing brains are not ready to experience the barrage of touch, light, sound, and other sensory inputs four months before they should have to.  

Truman’s cerebral palsy primarily affects his ability to speak and eat, but although not visible to others, he also deals daily with the stiffness, fatigue, and pain associated with spasticity.  In high school, having cerebral palsy led to recurrent knee dislocations and required two surgeries to reconstruct the tendons that hold his kneecaps in place.  During his junior year, he began experiencing convulsive fainting.  That was a very scary few months of neurologist visits, sleep studies, and MRIs until we learned it wasn't something more serious—just yet another complication of constricted veins and spasticity.  Then senior year, he dealt with ER-visit inducing pain due to scar tissue adhesion from his NICU-era bowel surgeries.  That was another scary time while we worried that the hernia left from bowel reconnection 19 years earlier might have strangled his small intestine.

Despite the daily struggles, Truman managed to graduate high school with honors last year and earn a full scholarship to Austin College.  He earned all As and Bs his first semester.  He uses the same resilience that helped him survive each and every day to tackle Sherman and this world with grit and grace.  We are so very proud to be his parents. 

The March of Dimes has become our family’s mission and passion so that no other baby will go through what Truman did, nor will any other parents watch their baby—or their teen—struggle this way.  We owe March of Dimes for our children’s lives.  We continue to raise funds for the promising new research being conducted right here in North Texas at UT Southwestern and around the country.  One project appears to have discovered that there may be a biomarker to indicate a likelihood of premature delivery—what a difference something could have made in our family's life.

To learn more about our family’s story, check out our video from the year we served as a March of Dimes Ambassador family at http://youtu.be/Ce89rmtZmWo.  And, please consider joining us a walker or donor at http://www.marchforbabies.org/kaltenbaumer.  

Thanks,

Kara, Ben, Truman & Elliott