Our 2 1/2 year old son has lived over half his life in casts with pins in his arms - we need our first family vacation!

After four miscarriages, I gave birth to a beautiful son, Brody. The only problem was, unbeknownst to us until the moment of his birth, Brody has multiple congenital issues, summed up as the congenital Vacterl association. He is now almost 3, and after 12 surgeries (with more to follow) Brody is stable, but with all of our medical bills, we do not have the money for a vacation. Brody has traveled by plane for a lot of his surgeries, but we've never had an actual family vacation. We’d like to learn what it's like to be a family outside of a hospital! And, since Brody has spent more than half of his life in casts with pins in his arms, and unable to swim or splash in a pool or bathtub, we'd like a vacation with lots of water around us!

Our journey began in 2004 when my husband, Jeremy, and I decided to try to have family. I became pregnant quite easily, and then had a miscarriage. And another. And then I got pregnant again, and we saw a heartbeat. And then I had another miscarriage.  And another.

I got testing done. Ten vials of blood drawn from both Jeremy and me. Nothing was wrong, they said.

So we kept trying.

And then I found a brilliant doctor who diagnosed me with three separate autoimmune issues that four previous doctors had not detected. The problem was he lived in another state, and my health insurance would not pay for his treatments. But we did it anyway, using any spare dollar we could find.

It worked. I got pregnant and stayed pregnant. We decided not to learn the gender of our baby. My obgyn informed that our baby had 10 fingers, two kidneys, and was perfectly healthy.  I still have the ultrasound picture with his notations: “L kidney, R kidney.”

At around 31 weeks, I was hospitalized with severe preeclampsia. At 33 weeks, on September 1, 2006, I underwent a C-section. I still remember the moment the doctor said, “It’s a boy!”  I also then noticed that Jeremy was shaking. I saw why. Brody’s hands looked crooked and bent in.

During the next terrifying days, we did not know if Brody would live. We learned the words Vacterl association (our son's official diagnosis) and tracheoesophageal fistula (TEF) (his esophagus did not lead into his stomach). Brody had his first surgery at 2 days old, and his second at 6 days old. We learned that in addition to TEF, Brody has only one kidney, with reflux, hypospadias, bilateral radial club hands (no radius bones in his forearms and no thumbs), and craniosynostosis (a fused metopic suture in his skull). As of June 2009, Brody has had a total of 12 surgeries.

Brody is silly, loud, witty, and the love of our lives. Now we are paying off all of these medical bills and we have no money left for a vacation. Please help!