Olivia Zapel and Julie Moore shared how Caring For Life has helped them through their childrens’ extraordinary medical needs.

“The greatest strength comes in the smallest bodies.”

That’s what Olivia Zapel has learned from the premature birth of her twin sons, Connor and Brendan. Not due until March, the boys — Olivia and her husband’s fourth and fifth children — showed up on January 20. Zapel said that Caring For Life sought her out and helped her family with gas and food to keep her going back and forth to Erie, where they spent months in the NICU.

“It’s a small community,” said Julie Moore, last year’s Mom Prom Queen. “So people share your name with Caring For Life and they find you.”

Moore, whose four-year-old daughter Delaney’s world changed last year when she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes and fitted with an insulin pump, agreed that she’d always loved what Caring For Life stood for. “But you just never think in a million years you’re going to be the one to need it.”

Moore said that for her family, it was one day fine and the next day not.

“No matter what the diagnosis is,” said Moore, “as a parent, it’s devastating.”

What both she and Zapel said has been most helpful — beyond even the financial help that enabled them to make the trips to seek treatment for their children — has been the community of mothers who’ve been in similar situations.

Many people, said Moore, don’t understand that Delaney’s diabetes is a lifelong disorder that will require constant monitoring and compensation, not to mention the pump, which Moore said “is part of her now.”

Said Moore, “there were moms on the board who’d been where I was. They understood, because they had lived it.”

Parenting itself is stressful, said Moore. It’s exponentially more so when your child needs ongoing medical care. Simply relearning how to manage Delaney’s diabetes has been all-consuming.

The Mom Prom — Caring For Life’s annual fundraising event — “it’s a time to just get out, let loose, de-stress,” said Moore. “It’s a night where you know, okay. I’m going to make it another year.”

Of Delaney, Moore said “she’s my strength.”

Zapel said that her twins are home now and their full recovery is expected, even after one of the boys relapsed and had to be sent to Pittsburgh after being released from Erie.

This year’s Mom Prom Queen, Alicyn Loney, said that she didn’t actually accept the financial help offered by Caring For Life, but that the acknowledgment of her family’s situation and potential friendships she’s gained have been life-changing. Loney’s pregnancy with her daughter, Harper, was normal, she said. She’d been to her checkups and ultrasounds with no outstanding news.

“She had normal anatomy. They just kept telling me everything was normal,” said Loney.

But there was a nagging feeling, she said, that something just wasn’t right. And there was the fact that no one was ever able to tell her the sex of her baby during an ultrasound.

It wasn’t until around 30 weeks gestation that Alicyn said she went to Jamestown, N.Y. for a 3D ultrasound. The popular pre-birth baby pictures have become the norm for many first-time moms, as Loney was. It was during that ultrasound, Loney said, that she started to feel even more like her sinking gut feeling was more than just first time mom jitters.

“The woman told me she’d been doing ultrasounds for forty years,” Loney said, “and that this was the first time in the whole forty years that she hadn’t been able to tell the sex of a baby.”

The ultrasound technician, she said, suggested that Loney seek another ultrasound from her midwife.

It was during that ultrasound, Loney said, that everything changed. Her daughter was diagnosed in utero with bladder exstrophy, a congenital defect that caused her bladder to form outside the abdominal wall. Along with other congenital defects, Loney said, Harper was facing some serious surgeries even before being born.

Loney fought to be induced at Pittsburgh, and won, but during the four hour procedure, which she was later told by her medical team that “everything had gone wrong,” the surgical tech turned surgery patient started hearing for drugs she recognized by name as drugs to treat a hemorrhage.

As soon as she heard Harper cry, Loney said, she told the surgical team to put her out, which they did. She’d lost two pints of blood during the procedure, so she really didn’t have to do much convincing. She woke up in the ICU, she said, and sent her husband Josh to be with Harper, who’d already been discharged to UMPC Children’s.

Three days later, Loney said, she met her daughter.

Harper, who just turned two on May 2, has been through two major surgeries to put her bladder back inside her body and reconstruct the parts of her body that hadn’t developed normally in the womb. Through both surgeries — more than 11 hours long each, Loney said she saw parents sharing the waiting room whose children were fighting cancer, premature babies who were having heart surgery.

“These kids were sick,” said Loney. “Harper wasn’t sick. I just felt so lucky. She wasn’t sick. No matter how bad it was, I knew it could be fixed.”

And Harper is a trooper. Between the strength of her child and the overwhelming support of family, friends, coworkers, and her employer, Loney said she’s considered herself fortunate not to need the financial help that Caring For Life was eager to provide. But, she said she appreciates its mission and has been supporting it by taking part in fundraisers and basket raffles.

Caring For Life gives thousands of dollars to families of children whose medical needs place financial hardship on them. They also provide emotional support through a board of directors whose members have lived through the serious medical diagnosis of their own children.