“Uh-oh … the bottle’s empty.”

“Need a refill? Give it here. I’ll get it.”

Chris Madding grabbed his daughter’s bottle and headed, not for the kitchen, but for her bedroom. Hissssssss. The sound was oxygen filling the little girl’s portable tank. With Faith, even bottles are very different from what most young families experience. You see, Faith is a very special little lady.

Faith was born May 29, 2002, by emergency Caesarian section. Her mother, Karen Madding, had been bedridden and hospitalized for weeks with serious complications of the pregnancy.

“I was put in the hospital 25 weeks into my pregnancy for toxemia and high blood pressure,” Karen said. “We had to do the emergency C-section about two weeks later, because both Faith and I were getting too sick.”

“When they put Karen in the hospital, it was amazing to me how strong she was,” Chris recalled. “They wanted to take Faith at 25-and-a-half or 26 weeks, but Karen fought through the pain of her own illness. She was amazing.”

The C-section saved both mother and child, and the family rejoiced over their tiny little girl, who weighed in at only 1 pound, 11 ounces. Chris and Karen watched as nurses settled Faith into her isolette in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at her birth hospital and anticipated taking her home in a few weeks, just as soon as she grew a little bigger and stronger.

Then, everything changed. Faith was diagnosed with a rare syndrome called Peters Plus. The first clue: cataracts clouded her baby-blue eyes. A cascade of findings followed that made Karen and Chris fear for Faith’s life.