Losing a child is never easy, but in the final days of her daughter Emmri’s life, mom Chelsey Banker was able to hold her without hurting her for the first time in so long.
Emmri had contracted cytomegalovirus, known as CMV, when she was born, causing her to have a host of health problems throughout her young life — including epilepsy, microcephaly, and spastic quadriplegia. But as Emmri’s health took a turn for the worse, her mom told TikTok she just felt grateful that they could be with her in her final days.
By the time Emmri’s life ended, her body “was tired,” her mom explained in a video.
“It was failing her,” Banker wrote in a video from February 20, “but we know her spirit lives on and is as vibrant as ever.”
Emmri was born on December 21, 2010. Banker said she was 18 and had a perfectly healthy pregnancy when she gave birth to her daughter — or so she thought.
“When I was pregnant with her I contracted a virus called CMV — cytomegalovirus,” she explained in a TikTok video from June 16, 2020. “It is a virus that to you or me is just a cold-like virus with mild symptoms. But if you catch it for the first time while you’re pregnant it can attack the baby’s brain and mess with their development, which is exactly what happened to my daughter.”
After a quick four-hour labor, Banker gave birth to Emmri, but noticed something was wrong when her cry “sounded like a baby kitten.”
She was also covered in petechiae, which according to the Cleveland Clinic are red dots that appear on the skin and are caused by broken capillaries under the skin.
After being transferred to the NICU at a different hospital, doctors found that Emmri had an enlarged liver and spleen, a small brain, calcium deposits on her brain, “and eventually the CMV, which has caused all of her health issues,” the mom continued on TikTok.
The mom stayed with Emmri night and day at the hospital.
At one point, she could recall her doctor sitting her down and telling her the cold, hard truth about what Emmri’s future would look like.
“He said, ‘Look. You’re daughter’s never gonna walk. She’s never gonna talk. She might not even smile. She may be in a vegetative state her entire life. I know this is scary and I know you’re young. But you take this baby home and you love her — you love her with everything you have — and everything will be just fine.’”
“And in that moment I knew she was meant to be mine,” she recalled.
It wasn’t always easy.
Unfortunately, Emmri’s doctor was right — she wasn’t able to walk or talk, and needed to use a wheelchair. But her mom said that “cognitively” her daughter was “all there.”
“She is very smart. She makes yes and no faces, she knows what she wants, she picks her own outfits, she picks out her own room decorations — you name it,” the mom continued in another video.
Emmri was doing really well until about age 5 when she started getting recurrent pneumonia “and was in the hospital a lot,” her mom said.
Then Emmri’s hips came out of place and while that didn’t bother her at first, it quickly became painful.
“So we’ve been kind of seeing a decline for the last four years,” Banker said in 2020, before adding that Emmri's brain and heart had stopped regulating properly and her other organs were starting to the "overworked."
The mom said she had recently gotten the paperwork started for a DNR — or do not resuscitate form — "we’ve always said we want her quality of life to come before her quantity and it’s time to put our money where our mouth is," she added.
By early 2022, Emmri’s health was rapidly declining.
The year before, Banker had put her into hospice care, but it was still so hard to watch her once smiley little girl be in so much pain.
“She’s crying pretty much 24/7,” Banker said in a video from January 16, 2022. “Her connective tissue and fascia is showing through one of her pressure sores.”
On February 20, 2022, at 11 years old, Emmri’s battle ended.
“It was peaceful,” her mom said through tears in an update video from February 22. “It was traumatic for Bobby [her husband] and I but she was peaceful. She’s finally able to rest. Crying both tears of relief and joy for her, but we’re also just sad because we miss her a lot.”
Adds the mom, “She was my best friend.”
A few days later, the mom said in hindsight she feels like she knew something was going to happen before Emmri’s death.
“For some reason, the past few months I had just been nesting, like when you’re pregnant, I just had this overwhelming compulsion to get everything done and to get her room finished,” she recalled.
“And now I know — I wasn’t nesting to bring a new baby home, I was nesting to send mine off,” she added.
The mom said that she gave Emmri a bath — which didn’t happen often because it was hard on her — and had a gut feeling that it was going to be her last one. “I just laid her on my chest and played with her hair,” she remembered. “And soaked it all in.”
Banker went on to explain, “It really hurt her to get touched for the last six months.” But on that night she cleaned Emmri’s fingers and toes and held her baby girl despite the pain.
The mom said after the bath, Emmri’s breathing changed and she had a feeling that this was a sign of “end of life.”
By that Saturday morning, Banker knew that Emmri’s condition wasn’t going to get any better. Her breathing was still bad and she called her friends and family and asked that they be prepared to say their goodbyes.
She was put on morphine every hour all day Saturday “and for the first time in months I could hold her and it didn’t hurt her,” Banker recalled.
Later that night, she had a “gut-feeling” to play ‘Temporary Home’ by Carrie Underwood.
“I hadn’t heard that song in years, but I used to sing it to her all the time when she was a little baby,” she said. “That’s when it really hit me that we were going to lose her soon.”
Emmri ended up dying while laying between her mother and her stepfather on Sunday morning — the mom believes she woke up and pretty much caught her daughter’s last few breaths.
“I’m glad I just didn’t wake up to find her gone one morning and that I really got to soak in my last day with her,” Banker added in a final video. “And I’m so glad that it didn’t get drug out much longer than that because it was quick — it was so quick — it was so painfully slow, but it was quick.”
