Amy and Scott Welch are just about able to take a collective deep breath.
But it’s hard to let down their guard.
The young couple have lost an infant daughter, only to be followed by another near-death experience with their second child, Kooper.
That 18-month-old Kooper is “almost” on par with his peers seems too good to be true, Amy said Tuesday evening from the warm environs of their rural Moran home. Since even before his birth, Kooper’s condition was tenuous. Amy suffered from preeclampsia, a condition where women develop high blood pressure and protein in their urine about midway through their pregnancies.
“It was nerve-wracking,” Amy said of her pregnancy. She remembers a blood pressure reading of 199 over 110 sent her to the hospital. She also suffers from a pregnancy-related blood clotting disorder that she said affected the baby’s nutritional needs.
Kooper was born June 13, 2010, at 28 weeks. He weighed 2 pounds, 1 ounce.
His older sister, Kalli, was born on July 16, 2009, at 25 weeks and weighed 1 pound, 3 ounces. She lived five days.
Amy has the 2-inch footprints from Kalli’s birth certificate tattooed on the inside of her left wrist.
“I needed something permanent to remember her by,” she said.
THE POSSIBILITY that Kooper would suffer the same fate as Kalli was never far from their minds, Amy said.
“In the first place, we never thought Kalli wouldn’t make it,” she said. What about all the miracle stories of babies even more premature than Kalli surviving.
Amy remembers a period of numbness and profound
sadness after Kalli died.
“It was hard to be around people whose lives kept moving. Ours had just stopped. See that depression in the couch,” she asks, pointing to an imaginary spot. “That’s where I sat, day after day.”
Kalli is buried down the road from the Welch home in Moran Cemetery.
By the next month Amy forced herself back to work. She teaches third grade at McKinley Elementary School.
