Love Karina

My name is Fernando and my wife is Melissa, and we have a beautiful daughter named Karina Alessia. Karina was born on September 5, 2007 at the Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey. She weighed in at 6lbs 5ozs and 19 1/2 inches tall.After a few days, we brought Karina home to join her sister Arianna for what we considered to be our completed family. Arianna is 4 and she has taken to Karina with such caring and love. She is just wonderful with her. We've always wanted two children and we could not be happier with Karina's arrival.After 2 weeks at home, Karina began to cry excessively. Melissa's motherly intuition thought that something was definitely not right about the way Karina cried.

We took Karina to her pediatrician and the doctor told us that Karina was probably suffering from acid reflux - common in many newborn babies. She prescribed some medication and off we went, back to what we thought was going to be normalcy.Another few weeks passed and Karina's acid reflux did not get any better. She also started to make abnormal movements which appeared seizure-like. She was also not meeting her developmental milestones. We decided the best thing to do was to bring her to the emergency room. Our lives would forever change that night and our nightmare began.

After many days in the hospital and numerous tests, we were told that Karina may be suffering from mitochondrial disease.

We had never heard of mitochondrial disease and we did not know what to expect. The doctors still cannot tell us for certain what her prognosis will be, so we are taking things day by day and praying that she will have as normal a life as possible.

We created this blog as a way to communicate with family and friends and keep them up-to-date on how Karina is doing.

It is also our hope that we can bring awareness to this rare disease and offer some support to other families going through a similar situation.