A Wild Ride
by Ellen Orr, photo by Molly Minter
Kandice and Wade Kimmel reflect on their journey of building a storybook life for their family of five
Wade and Kandice Kimmel met in 2004 on a blind date. He was a lawyer, and she was taking classes to become a forensic interviewer for the Children’s Advocacy Center. They fell in love quickly and were married a short year later, when they immediately started trying to expand their family.
Kandice consulted her doctor early on, as she suspected she had reproductive issues. “I had a feeling it would be difficult, and I just wanted to know what we were up against.” Even with moderate medical intervention, including medication, after two years, the couple was still not pregnant. They sought out a fertility specialist.
The specialist diagnosed the couple with multiple infertility conditions, including Kandice with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, or PCOS. “He said it would be very difficult for us to get pregnant, especially on our own,” Kandice said. Their insurance covered one round of in vitro fertilization, which the doctor said was the most likely way for the couple to conceive, so that’s what they did, in May 2008. They implanted two embryos, as the doctor recommended.
At the first ultrasound appointment, they saw one baby—and Kandice was devastated. “I cried and cried and cried on the way home because I just knew there were two babies,” Kandice said. “Wade was like, ‘You’ve been crying for two years because you couldn’t get pregnant, and now you’re pregnant and you’re still crying. What are we gonna do?’ I just felt like I’d had a baby that died, which sounds crazy, but I just knew.
“The next week, Wade was out-of-town for work, and I had some bleeding, so I freaked out and called the doctor and went in for another ultrasound. The ultrasound tech asked if I wanted the good news or the bad news. I told her I wanted the bad news, and she said, ‘It’s twins.’ And I said, ‘What’s the good news?’ and she said, ‘It’s twins!’” She was elated. (The tech then asked her to get up and “empty her bladder” because she thought she saw a third. “That was the fastest I’ve ever emptied my bladder in my entire life.”) Kandice called Wade, who was en route to a deposition in Little Rock, to tell him that he was going to have two babies. He had to pull over on the side of the road.
At Week 26, Kandice was put on bed rest to delay labor, but even so, by Week 27, she had dilated to a two, and the doctors told her she needed to be airlifted to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital. Wade raced home to pack bags and would meet them in Little Rock. “As I pulled up into the driveway, the helicopter flew right over our house, headed to Little Rock. Kandice and my unborn kids were in that helicopter. It was the most surreal moment of my life,” he said.
By the time Kandice landed in Little Rock, she was dilated to a five and having contractions. “We thought we were having babies that night,” she said. “It was super scary. We thought they weren’t going to make it.” Thankfully, the doctors were able to administer drugs to put things on pause.
Kandice spent the next month in the UAMS. Two weeks into her stay, one of the babies’ water broke. On drugs to prevent early labor, Kandice was stable, but she was in a constant state of anticipating labor at any moment.
Wade was spending every night at the hospital and every day in Texarkana at work.
On December 23, Kandice went into a labor that the doctors couldn’t stop. Wade had driven through the now-infamous Arkansas ice storm of 2008 and had just arrived home when he received the call from Kandice telling him to turn around. Via c-section, Cooper Anthony and Olivia Grace entered the world at 8:15 and 8:16 p.m. At eight weeks early, each weighed under five pounds. Cooper was jaundiced and required tube feeding and oxygenation—a scary situation, but what was to be expected for a two-month-early newborn. Kandice and Wade were allowed to hold him for two hours a day. Olivia, however, was a different story.
“They came to me and told me that Olivia’s little body and lungs were just working too hard, so they had to put her on a vent,” Kandice remembered. “When we saw her, she was on oxygen, she was tube-fed, she had IVs in her head, she had a vent, she had a brain bleed, and her feet were purple-black because her circulation was so bad. Her skin was almost see-through—that not-ready-to-be-born skin. She was still developing. She was a hot mess, but she was gorgeous to me. It was a week before I could hold her.”
On Christmas Day, Kandice was discharged from the hospital. The only restaurants that were open served Chinese food, so that’s what Kandice and Wade ate for Christmas dinner, a practice that has become a Kimmel family tradition.
The second week of January, the twins were released from the hospital, and Kandice, Cooper, and Olivia finally got to go home, after six weeks in Little Rock. Their life as a family of four began. Before long, Kandice returned to her career as a forensic interviewer, helping abused children during the day and tending her own babies at night. Wade and Kandice, as well as the twins’ grandparents and nanny, doted on Cooper and Olivia as they grew steadily into the healthy, smart, sweet children they are today.
“They’re both caring individuals who are in-tune with other people’s feelings, and they never want to hurt anybody else,” Wade said. He and Kandice both reflected on how the twins are in many ways starkly different but the same in the only way that really matters: their kindness.
With such incredible kids, it would be reasonable to feel content with their family of four, but in January of 2016, Kandice and Wade decided to try for one more child. They weren’t willing to do in vitro again due to the price. Fertility drugs were presented as a more affordable option, but even so, they were still very costly. The specialist recommended the couple try the drugs for three months. Wade and Kandice decided to try for only one month instead, feeling as if they couldn’t potentially throw away that much money, which “could be a fun vacation, or tuition, or something else that our kids needed, rather than a chance that we might get pregnant again,” Kandice said. “It was too much of a gamble” for them to try for longer than a month.
After a month: no pregnancy. They gave up. “I knew I wasn’t done with babies,” Kandice said. “I figured we would foster one day.” They were at peace with it.
And then, four months later, despite all odds, Kandice found herself looking at a positive pregnancy test.
It was a smooth pregnancy, and on March 21, 2017, at 8:17 a.m., Finn Alexander was born.
Six days later, at his newborn check-up, the pediatrician found Finn’s heartbeat was so fast she couldn’t count it: 254 beats per minute. They thought he was having a heart attack. He and Kandice were airlifted to Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Wade, again, was out-of-town for work, this time in court in Fayetteville. Kandice managed to get a message into the presiding judge, who relayed to Wade that he needed to get to Little Rock immediately. “I drove 100 miles an hour the whole way there and beat [the helicopter] to the hospital,” Wade said.
The doctors at Arkansas Children’s diagnosed Finn with Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a problem with the electrical wiring of the heart. If the episode Finn experienced at the doctor had gone unnoticed, he could have experienced a heart attack and died. The fact that it had occurred at the pediatrician’s office in his first week of life was nothing short of miraculous. After four days at Children’s, they returned home with medicine and a stethoscope. He would need medicine every six hours and regular monitoring of his heart rate, but he was going to be fine.
When approached about letting Texarkana Parent publish their story, Kandice and Wade asked why their story was worth telling. It wasn’t until the end of the interview that Kandice said to Wade, “We really have been through some crazy stuff with all these kids!” They have become so accustomed to—and grateful for—their “normal,” which has been facilitated so significantly by impeccable medical care. “We haven’t received poor healthcare anywhere we’ve gone,” said Kandice. “All of the doctors and nurses have been wonderful,” added Wade.
The care they’ve received has allowed them to build a storybook life for their family of five. They consider their main values to be family time, which includes family dinner every night; church at Beech Street First Baptist; education in a play-based environment, like St. James; and seeing the world. Wade notes that he and Kandice don’t take “adult-only vacations.” “We want our kids to see and experience things,” he said. And, Kandice added, with kids as fun and wanted as theirs, it’s no sacrifice to take them along for the ride.
