March 17, 2014: Meeting Miles
March 25, 2021
Brooke and Cade had a 22-month-old son, so the delivery room wasn’t foreign to them when Miles was born on St. Patrick’s Day. But nothing else was the same.
Miles’ skin was deep blue and Brooke didn’t get to hold him immediately. Instead, he was quickly moved to the neonatal ICU for tests while Cade followed.
“They cut the umbilical cord, they put him under this lamp, they do all this stuff, and then they take him away,” Cade said. “So you just feel empty.”
Cade went to see his family in the waiting room.
“Once I saw my dad and my mom, I just lost it,” Cade said. “Broke down. I just couldn’t handle it.”
Brooke and Cade held Miles for the first time when he was two days old. The world was still asleep at 5 a.m. and he would be having his first heart surgery in an hour, but getting to touch more than his thumb was special.
“It’s just kind of like the calm before the storm,” Brooke said. “You know what’s about to happen to him, so that’s hard, but it’s really sweet. That’s definitely a moment I remember very vividly.”
When you’re a dad, you just want to be able to help your kids become these great men, and there’s nothing that I could do that was helping my son at that point. — Cade Ogilvie, Athletic Trainer
Brooke and Cade stayed in the hospital for a week, then they took turns with Miles in the cardiac unit.
Every day seemed to bring a new accomplishment to celebrate — getting off a certain medication, requiring one less tube. The nurses called Miles “Super Baby.”
But on the seventh day, Brooke and Cade almost lost their newborn.
“When you’re a dad, you just want to be able to help your kids become these great men, and there’s nothing that I could do that was helping my son at that point,” Cade said. “Having to take a backseat to that and have somebody else step in was hard for me.”
Brooke was at the vending machine when she heard the nurses call code blue for Miles. She then got a text from Cade.
Don’t come back.
“I think he was just trying to protect me from not going in, but I was like, ‘No, I’m definitely going,’” Brooke said. ‘“I don’t care. I need to know what’s going on.’”
The doctors came in and out of the room for about 30 minutes, updating Brooke and Cade constantly. With each piece of news, they relaxed — the doctors were able to save their baby.
However, the fragility of Miles’ condition suddenly seemed all too real.
“I think for us, that was a reality of ‘We really aren’t in control here,’” Brooke said. “He could pass away.”