A Pennsylvania couple tied the
knot this weekend after having only one week to prepare for their wedding to
ensure their 2-year-old son, who is dying from a rare disease, would be present
to share in the experience.
Doctors told Christine Swidorsky and Sean
Stevenson that Logan, their little boy, only had weeks to live.
The couple had been planning to get married next year, but once they got the
dire news from the doctor, they decided to move up the wedding, which took place
Saturday in Jeannette, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh.
They had the 12-minute ceremony in the backyard of their home.
Logan wore a pin-striped suit as he was carried by Swidorsky.
"This is our dream come true," said Swidorsky, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
reported Saturday.
Sean Stevenson thanked friends and family who donated food and helped out
with wedding arrangements so the family could spend much of the day
together.
"It means the world to me. It means the world to me. We're just blessed every
day that he's here with us," he said.
Logan was born with a rare blood disorder called Fanconi's anemia, which keeps cells from
repairing damaged DNA and can lead to certain cancers.
"We knew about that but always had it in back of our minds that we've just
got to get over this next hump no matter what it was," Stevenson said earlier in
the week.
Even though Logan was born a month early and had difficulty eating, Stevenson
said he was a normal baby for the first year of his life.
A few months after his first birthday, however, Logan was diagnosed with
acute myeloid leukemia, which is uncommon in people younger than 45, according to the American Cancer Society.
Logan underwent chemotherapy and a cord blood transplant, and went into
remission for nine months.
"As time went by, we started noticing Logan was doing really good." Stevenson
said. "It kind of seemed like our family was getting back to some kind of
normalcy."
But it didn't last. Swidorsky noticed Logan was acting strange, Stevenson
said. He lifted his left arm a lot as if he were stretching, but she sensed
there was something wrong with her son. They soon learned he had a tumor the
size of an orange on his left kidney.
Doctors removed the tumor and the kidney, leaving Logan with a right kidney
that was smaller than normal and didn't function properly, which is common in
Fanconi's anemia patients. Further therapy to shrink the tumor wasn't possible,
Stevenson said.
That was when doctors advised the family to make memories while they still
could. They called the Make-a-Wish Foundation and set up a trip to Disney World
(Disney World and ABC News are both owned by the Walt Disney Co.). On the second
morning of their trip, Logan's grandmother woke Swidorsky and Stevenson.
"There's something wrong with Logan," she said.
Stevenson saw that Logan was lethargic and his eyes rolled toward the back of
his head.
After stays at two hospitals in Florida, where doctors told the family that
Logan was dehydrated and in septic shock, Logan was returned to Pittsburgh
Children's Hospital on a medical flight. After spending almost three weeks on a
ventilator, he woke up.
"He was home not even a week, maybe four or five days, and my fiancee started
noticing something," Stevenson said. "That's when they found a mass in the same
spot where his left kidney would have been."
On July 26, doctors told Stevenson and Swidorsky that their son would live no
more than three weeks.
"We were waiting for when Logan got better so it would be a wonderful day for
him," Stevenson said of their previous wedding plans. "We just decided to have
the wedding together this weekend and threw everything together in a week."
The family wants to share Logan's story to show the world how hard he fought,
and to let other families with sick children know they're not alone.
"The toughest thing a parent has to do is bury one of their children,"
Stevenson said. "He showed me personally that I have to be as strong as he
was."
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