| Mary K Elizabeth Butt |
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Oct. 24, 1994-May 3, 2003 My daughter Mary was a happy, healthy 8 ½ year old. She was in second grade and very involved in school and church. She loved reading and helping her friends and teachers in any way possible. Mary played soccer, baseball, sang in the church choir, and played in the church bell choir. She was also a very talented artist. She loved to draw and paint, and had been to art camp for the first time the previous summer. Mary was my oldest child and only daughter. She loved being the oldest and was great at helping her two younger brothers in a variety of ways. She also loved to tease them at times. Mary loved to help me clean the house and do the laundry. Mary was a huge animal lover and adored her cat Tigger, and our family dog Daisy. On Saturday, May 3rd, 2003 the life of our family changed forever. Mary was playing in the front yard with her brothers and cousins, when she suddenly collapsed for no reason. A heroic attempt was made to try and resuscitate her and she was life-flighted to Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. The efforts to save her were not successful. Mary died that day, and we had no idea why. Up to this point Mary was perfectly healthy and had never had any warning signs that anything was wrong. The doctors ruled her cause of death as a cyst on her pineal gland the size of a pea. There were other doctors who did not buy into this cause of death. After six months of meeting with doctors and talking to many friends in the health profession, I was directed that her cause of death could have been heart related. The SADS web site put the final pieces of the puzzle together. Since November of 2003 my father, brother, niece, nephew, and myself have been diagnosed with LQTS. My father, brother and myself all had ICD's implanted and my niece and nephew are currently on beta-blockers. We also discovered during this process that my sister, also named Mary K, died because of LQTS seventeen years earlier. On the one-year anniversary of my daughter's death we held a walk in her memory. We raised over $12,000 and used the money to purchase five AED's for the local schools and also donated a portion of it to the SADS Foundation to help raise awareness. Although my family has gained life-saving information because of my daughter's death, there isn't a day that goes by that we don't wish that she were still with us. Her winning smile and big brown eyes will forever be etched in our memory. She will live on forever in the hearts of everyone she knew. |
