Anastasia Harbour remembers a few searing images of her 4-year-old daughter lying unconscious on concrete, after the girl fell from a second-story window last month.
The rest of the memory is dark and bitten around the edges.
Serafina “Fifi” Blue Day was playing in a second-story bedroom with other girls at a friend’s house in Sheridan the evening of June 10, two months after she turned 4.
Harbour was upstairs watching the girls play. The window was open, and she shut it, Harbour recalled. When all the little girls ran downstairs, Harbour followed.
She sat down for a moment, and the girls ran back upstairs without her, shrieking happily, she said.
Unbeknownst to her, someone (one of the kids?) re-opened the window.
Harbour said she turned to go check on the girls, but just then, the oldest girl rushed downstairs and shouted, “Fifi fell!”
She rushed outside.
Serafina lay face-down on the concrete. She looked dead.
Harbour screamed. Whole patches of those moments are black, a gash in her memory that she attributes to trauma. The memory seems like a nightmare now, disconnected.
“It’s just the worst thing you can experience as a parent,” Harbour reflected in a Monday interview with Cowboy State Daily.
Over the past five weeks, she said, she’s unpacked the gravity of what happened. She ruminates on how irreversible a split second can be. She contrasts her struggle to the ignorant bliss of parents whose kids are healthy, and she leans into her faith in God.
The Constant Prayer
A neighbor heard Harbour screaming and came to help. Someone placed Serafina on a couch in the home, then into an ambulance headed toward the Sheridan hospital.
Harbour remembers riding to the hospital in a fire truck. She remembers finding herself in the hospital in Sheridan, praying nonstop over her daughter.
Serafina was flown that night to the Anschutz Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colo., along with her dad.
Harbour flew to the hospital the next morning, she said.
Serafina was in a coma with brain damage and fractures in her neck, spine and femur. Her coma lasted nearly 10 days.
“I was preparing myself for her to die or to be a vegetable when she woke up,” said Harbour.
Medical professionals told her the little girl might not wake up; might not be able to talk. They warned of potential paralysis or deafness. Serafina’s brain was injured and short on oxygen. Several brain cells had died, Harbour recalled doctors telling her.
Harbour kept praying anyway. So did other family and friends and their networks. She estimated a thousand people were praying for her little girl.
Serafina woke up June 20.
With apprehension, Harbour watched the girl for signs that she was a different person. At first Serafina was unable to talk.
“She knew what we were saying, she’d respond with her head. She knew who we were,” Harbour recalled.
Then Serafina grew more like her spunky, girly self each day.
“She’s so smart,” Harbour recalled with joy. “It’s been a complete miracle.”
The little girl regained her ability to speak. Her right leg remains in a rigid brace so her femur can heal, but she’s been dancing, wiggling her little body in her wheelchair. All her limbs are still mobile, Harbour said.
She can be fussy at times. Doctors told Harbour that’s common in children after brain injuries.
Still in the hospital and refusing to nap, Serafina showed off her multi-colored fingernails to Cowboy State Daily in a Monday FaceTime call. She promised to be nice while asking her mother to retrieve a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
She’s scheduled to return home July 31.
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To Feel The Sun
Soon after her daughter woke, Harbour gently prodded the girl’s memory of her fall.
“Do you remember the window?” Harbour asked.
Serafina sobbed and tried to mouth the words “I’m sorry,” said Harbour.
Serafina told her mother later that she was holding hands with another little girl as they played. The window was open. Serafina pushed on the window screen to feel the sun on her hands, she said. That was when she burst through the screen and fell.
Serafina has voiced regret and sadness over that awful moment, Harbour said. Sometimes the girl is sad when she sees her friends playing and running.
Harbour said she encourages her daughter by pointing out how much progress she’s made in her healing.
“We talk about it now and I say she’s blessed, and she’s strong, and she’s a warrior and everybody’s proud of her,” said Harbour. “I think she’s going to have a very strong mindset after this. She already has shown so much determination to get out of here and get better.”
Wow, Sheridan
Harbour describes herself as a “single mom” being Serafina’s primary custodial parent. She said she was working three jobs before Serafina’s fall.
Now she’s been in the hospital with her for nearly five weeks and has been unable to work.
“I’m so lucky that the town I live in is extremely caring,” said Harbour. “I had no idea they were like this – on this level; so many people donated when they heard about what happened to me and to her dad.”
Harbour said she’s nervous to return home and go back to work, knowing her daughter will be with her family or eventually, at daycare. She was a helicopter parent even before the incident, she said.
But, “the fact that she almost died and is doing well makes me feel like we’re being protected and taken care of by God,” said Harbour.
She expects to take her daughter with her to work, cleaning houses. Serafina’s dad will be helping out, too, she said.
It’s hard for her to wallow in fear while in a children’s hospital, surrounded by the full arc of human hope and anguish.
“Other people have it so much worse – so I’m really just staying positive and trusting that everything is going to keep working for us,” Harbour said.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
