Steve and Sarah Yates had been married for just a few months when a baby girl named Zariah came into their lives and changed everything. (We wrote about their adoption journey with Zariah last year.) Shortly after the story was published, and only a few months after they adopted Zariah on April 6th, Zariah went into cardiac arrest due to hypoxia.
“I was at work and my husband was doing a Walmart pickup. Zariah was just sitting on the couch watching TV,” Sarah said. “My husband gave her a big kiss on the forehead and said he would see her when he got back. When he got home from the groceries, the home health nurse who was watching Zariah came right out and said, ‘Zariah’s not breathing.’ When he got in there, my husband almost immediately realized her trach was out and put her trach back in and started doing CPR.”
Sarah got a phone call from EMS saying that Zariah was in cardiac arrest. Before she could get home to see Zariah, she got a phone call saying the EMTs were able to get a pulse, and they were driving her to the ER.
“With my medical background, I knew it would take a miracle for her to come home. I kept having to tell myself again and again, ‘This is real. This is not a dream. This is happening.’”
Steve and Sarah met Zariah upstairs in one of the rooms in the PICU. “One of the PICU attendees came in and said, ‘There’s a very good possibility she’s brain dead right now.’”
The following night, Zariah’s brain activity decreased so much the doctors and nurses thought something was wrong with the machines. “Steve and I told the PICU attendees that we were going to remove life support on Tuesday. On Saturday, we just spent the weekend holding her. When I held her, I cried and cried.”
“I felt like I had failed her, because if I was there, this probably wouldn’t have happened,” Sarah said. “But I’m so glad I got to know her, and I got to be her mom.”
After Zariah passed last year, Steve and Sarah continued to foster through Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries.
“We have five kids placed with us right now. We have an eleven-year-old, two seven-year-olds and two one-year-olds. The kids currently with us have gone through so much – more than some adults will go through their entire life – and they’re only seven. I hate it when people say, ‘Your kids are so lucky to have you.’ If these kids were lucky, they would’ve been born into a nice, stable, loving family. That’s what they deserve. They don’t deserve to be in foster care.”
The number one risk factor for having your children end up in foster care is being a former foster youth – it’s usually a generational trauma cycle. “The best thing for these kids is for their parents to get their lives together and for them to go back to their parents, because that’s going to cause the least trauma for them in the long run. They still love their bio families, and most of the time that’s where they still want to be,” Sarah said.
“If it wasn’t for my faith in Christ, there’s no way Steve and I could do this. Fostering is so hard. We’ve sacrificed almost everything for these kids,” said Sarah. “Foster care is hard, but every child is worth it.”
For more stories about the reality of foster care, visit coyotehill.org/this-is-foster-care.
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