Our story begins in August, 2005 in the fifth month of my pregnancy with my second child. My husband and I were sitting in the doctor's office, anxiously waiting for the results of the sonogram. We brought our 7-year-old daughter along to learn the sex of her sibling. We held hands as they gave us the news: It was a girl! Our hearts leapt with joy! The doctor continued his evaluation and discovered she had a congenital heart defect that was going to need immediate attention from a cardiologist...Ok, Ok, we can do this, we thought... and she most likely will have Down Syndrome. We were speechless. That will be different. We took a deep breath, looked at each other and then said, "Ok, we can handle this."

We told our families and then finished the nursery. Shortly after her birth, my 5 lbs 5 oz bundle of joy underwent surgery to correct her heart defect.. Doctors then discovered Catherine had pulmonary hypertension. We anticipated a seven-day stay, however, each day brought new challenges associated with Down Syndrome. Respiratory and feeding issues were soon on our list of concerns. Catherine had two additional surgeries. When it was finally over, she spent 92 of her first 365 days in the hospital.

It was an exhausting experience. We knew we had come through the worst part of the ordeal and had survived. We took home a baby who was going to need round-the-clock medical care for an undetermined length of time. My husband and I are both good at math – I am a Geophysicist and he works in sales for a national insurance company. But nothing had prepared us for the 14 different daily medications, prescribed in various systems and increments. We had multiple daily monitoring systems, and to top it off, 84 appointments with doctors, therapists and specialists.

As soon as we got a system worked out, the dosages would change and the process would start all over. Organization is a busy mom’s best tool. Knowing that, I often prepared dosages during the evening to cover late night and early morning administration of medication. I grew increasingly comfortable with the metric system using cubic centimetres or milliliters, but often found a number of her medications in the English system using teaspoons.  Conversions were made with a calculator or computer. But something unnerved me. How accurate are my calculations? Am I over medicating or under medicating? In the middle of the night, we put frantic calls into the pharmacist to ensure the proper calculations.

One night, in exasperation, tears were flowing down my cheeks and I asked out loud, “Isn’t there an easier way to do this?” In my few spare moments, I researched slide rules and other conversion tools. None of them met my precise needs. My final answer was to create a conversion tool as a slide ruler that is simple, easy and accurate, even in the dead of night when you have had little to no sleep.

It wasn’t about how smart we were, or how much education or lack of education we may have had. We needed the right tool for the right job at the right time. The solution was the MedConverter. We hope the MedConverter and the other products designed by me, a mom, for moms like you makes life a little easier so you can spend more time enjoying parenthood with a little less fear of making a dosage mistake.