Junie is currently fighting a rare blood disorder called Fanconi Anemia. She started her bone marrow transplant (BMT) with 6 days of intense chemotherapy and received her new bone marrow cells on June 19th, 2024. She’s expected to be in Denver for 100-180 days if all goes well and there are no additional complications.
To follow along with the most current updates, please visit her amazing mom’s page on Facebook: Sarah Witbrod – https://www.facebook.com/switbrod
We setup a GoFundMe page to help with medical, travel and all of the many expenses for our family of ten. https://gofund.me/2d79d34e
Junie’s Journey was a fitting name as she’s already had an amazing journey in her little life. She was born in Ukraine and left at the hospital by her family to be put up for adoption. She had an emergency surgery, left on her own to recover, then brought to an orphanage and lived there for the next two and a half years. We showed up in January 2022 to meet her and say yes in person to her and our son we were adopting. Both had been diagnosed with severe medical issues and we had been spending all of 2021 getting our adoption paperwork and home study in order. After saying yes and spending as much time as we could in their orphanage with each of them in January, we flew home and were eagerly waiting our official court date. They scheduled it for 2/22/22 – what a special day for our family! Court was successful and they were our babies legally, but we had to wait for additional paperwork to be completed so we could get them out of their orphanage on Wednesday, February 23, 2022. Wednesday night, we tucked our new babies into bed and were eager to wake up and fly to Warsaw, Poland to finish immigration steps as the US Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine had shutdown because of Russia moving troops around Ukraine. Instead of waking up to a peaceful and quiet Thursday morning, we woken up to explosions in the night as Russia invaded in the early hours of Thursday, February 24, 2022. We eventually made our way by car with our amazing adoption team through Moldova, into Romania and flew from Bucharest to Warsaw to finish at the US Embassy as many Ukrainians and others were also fleeing into other parts of Europe.
