When his wife’s doctor kept urging her to get an abortion to avoid having a disabled child, Sam Anderson almost snapped.
Almost.
Sam’s wife Tasha Anderson was about 26 weeks pregnant in spring 2023, when they started having to travel from their home in Lander, Wyoming, to Colorado for extensive screenings. Tasha had been showing blood flow restrictions for about seven weeks.
Her baby girl had dextrocardia, meaning her heart was on the right side of her body instead of on the left where it was supposed to be. She was certain to have mental or physical disabilities or both, Tasha’s doctor told the couple.
It was a little late in the pregnancy, but the doctor said he knew someone who would perform an abortion, according to Sam Anderson’s interview with Cowboy State Daily.
Sam scowled.
Tasha was also appalled, but she sensed her husband’s tension and wondered if he’d make a scene. He didn’t, and she was proud of him for that, she told Cowboy State Daily.
Sam asked the doctor to leave the room. Then he turned to his wife.
“Is this going to be an issue for you — if she does have physical or mental disabilities?” Sam asked Tasha. “Are you going to love the kid any different?”
Tasha said no, she’d love that baby no matter what.
“Perfect. We’re on the same page,” said Sam.
When the doctor returned to the room, Tasha announced that abortion was not an option.
“No matter how she’s created and how she’s born, that’s God’s intention for her,” she said.
It was harder for Sam to hold in his emotions during that visit than it was for Tasha, he told Cowboy State Daily. A former addict and a born-again Christian for the past six years, Sam had to fight to keep his former, impulsive self from bubbling to the surface.
The pair went to their car and prayed.
Now a year and a half later, they are smitten with their baby girl Jamesyn, whom they describe as a reminder of how precious life is, and how blessed they are even when they feel utterly helpless.
32 Weeks
At Tasha’s 32nd week of pregnancy in May 2023, medical professionals dilated her so she could give birth. Nausea and dizziness wracked her body and brain.
The professionals in the room realized she had preeclampsia, a serious condition involving high blood pressure. They dosed her with medicine and urged her to push.
The baby’s heart rate dropped, so the doctors pivoted and rushed Tasha to an emergency cesarian section, only to find that Tasha’s placenta had grown through her uterus, she had endometriosis, and she was hemorrhaging.
It was a hurricane of things that can go wrong during pregnancy and delivery.
Doctors pulled out a 2-pound baby girl: Jamesyn.
The birth, usually a precious moment for mothers, tumbled into other events. Tasha lost more than half her blood. Jamesyn was rushed to surgery because her esophagus wasn’t linked properly to her stomach.
1 Month Old
The baby lay in an incubator post-surgery. Neither Tasha nor Sam could touch her for the first month of her life. Doctors struggled to give Jamesyn the care she needed because the industry just doesn’t make medical instruments that small, for that unique of a procedure, said Tasha.
Tasha was finally allowed to hold Jamesyn against her chest when the baby was about a month old and had bulked up to three pounds.
The medical hell didn’t stop. Jamesyn required a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine until she was 2 months old.
She required blood transfusions and multiple surgeries – attempts to stretch her esophagus to attach it to her stomach. Even once doctors made that attachment, the baby always had recurring problems breathing.
Doctors didn’t know where to inject her IVs because her tiny veins ran in unpredictable patterns.
She remained in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for the first four months of her life.
5 Months Old
At 5 months old, Jamesyn was hospitalized for one of her many surgeries, and Tasha walked into her hospital room to find her ribs pluming and collapsing.
Doctors had tried to insert an IV into a vein in her neck but her veins were so unpredictable that the fluid shot straight into her lungs instead.
She was drowning.
Medical personnel realized what was happening and pulled the tube.
“That was our first instance of almost losing her,” said Tasha.
It was also around that time that an infection spread through Jamesyn’s left hand, and she came within an hour of having to have it amputated. Doctors cut out dead tissue and plugged in shark cartilage to replace it. Her hand is large, scarred and weak, but she can now bend and move it, said Tasha.
Jamesyn’s surgeon calls her “Murphy,” because anything that can go wrong with her procedures, will.
Yet, the baby girl has been a fighter from the start. Even as a newborn, she threw up her fists and shot looks of disapproval at nurses prodding her. Now a year and a half old with a mouth full of teeth, she flashes her loved ones with a Julia Roberts smile. She’s fought through every surgery, every infection, every bout of starvation from a digestive lapse.
She’s scheduled Monday for what her parents hope will be one last surgery — her 28th — to seal a tunnel that leaks her food and saliva into her lungs, starving and infecting her at the same time.
First Life Flight
Jamesyn’s first of two life flights out of Lander happened April 4, when she was 11 months old. She couldn’t breathe.
Once in Denver, her body started shutting down.
While doctors bustled and barked, one doctor in the group appeared intensely focused on Jamesyn’s midsection.
He looked at the girl, shoved her stomach upward with his hands and plunged an IV through her abdominal muscles.
It was a wild gamble, on a baby whose veins usually can’t be found without an ultrasound.
“He basically took a blind shot at her but was able to get an IV in right away,” said Tasha, of Dr. Matt Gollub. “After that, she was able to kind of start recovering.”
Tasha didn’t know how controversial the move was until the days following the event, when doctors and nurses would come into Jamesyn’s room, look at her belly and murmur, “I can’t believe he did that.”
That same doctor has saved Jamesyn’s life a total of three times, said Tasha.
On another occasion, Jamesyn had RSV, norovirus and pneumonia all at once. That was when the Anderson family learned food was leaking into her lungs.
Gollub applied a breathing bag to her for an hour, said Tasha.
And another day that month, out of nowhere, Jamesyn’s heart stopped. Tasha said Gollub happened to be looking at her monitor in that moment and was able to save her life for the third time.
The Darkest Day
The Anderson family has developed a prayer channel that has grown beyond family and friends, to people living as far away as Korea and Germany.
Tasha called on them in late August, during the bleakest of Jamesyn’s struggles. She had lost hope.
Facing still more procedures, Jamesyn became depressed. Her light went out.
“She was aware enough to know she was back in the hospital,” said Tasha. “She wouldn’t smile, wouldn’t look at you.”
For Tasha, it boded disaster. Jamesyn’s joy and spunk had buoyed her through freak circumstances. The mother didn’t know how her daughter would survive without those.
Tasha sent out a request to her prayer chain, begging them to pray that Jamesyn’s spark would come back.
The next morning, the little “spitfire” woke smiling, the light back in her eyes, Tasha recalled.
Well, Half Right
It’s been a long journey. Jamesyn is taking her food directly through a tube in her stomach, after continuing digestive struggles prompted extreme vomiting in July. She was 14 months old and only weighed nine pounds.
She once endured a two-week-long induced coma.
Her infections, quarantines and hospitalizations almost never end. She suffers withdrawals when she comes off medications.
Jamesyn never had the strength to crawl but now at nearly 18 months old, she can “cruise” walk. She can’t talk, but cognitively, “she’s right on point,” said Tasha.
Sam is working multiple jobs to carry the financial load. Tasha wakes at odd hours to administer treatments to her baby.
Tasha said her obstetrician in Colorado was half right: there was no doubt Jamesyn would have disabilities.
But neither Tasha nor Sam regret having their little girl.
“I can’t even imagine life without her,” said Tasha. “She’s taught me so much about strength and resilience, as she goes into these surgeries.”
When Jamesyn returns to her acute care team in Colorado, everyone lights up. Staffers have personally approached Tasha to say that she's changed their lives.
“She’s a favorite because she has such a great personality, and they know her to be such a fighter,” said Tasha.
Tasha can always tell when her toddler is on the brink of a recovery, because she’ll get annoyed and start throwing stuff from her crib – like she’s willing herself to get better. A few miracles have happened along the way, like a recovery from a low platelet count that no doctor could explain.
Tasha has seen a full range of heartbreak in the NICU, from a parent who’d only been there a week having a breakdown at the strain, to parents losing their child, and hosting a family funeral right there in the wing.
“It’s so heart-wrenching,” she said. But the Anderson family has always approached Jamesyn’s room prayerfully, gratefully, as if every moment with her is an undeserved privilege, she said.
Sam and Tasha Anderson feel nothing but helpless in that room. But people only really understand where they stand as human beings when they’re reduced to helplessness, said Sam.
“Jamesyn has helped me find that. Helped me understand what true, unconditional love is. The difference between an earthly father’s love and our heavenly father’s love,” he said. “It’s been a huge change in my view on faith.”
Those who would like to donate to ease the family’s medical expenses may do so here.
Contact Clair McFarland at clair@cowboystatedaily.com
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
