Kati Martinez of Aurora, Illinois, didn’t know her son Micah had down syndrome until after she gave birth to him on Oct. 21, 2019.
She later decided to share the personal moment she and her husband, Abe Martinez, found out Micah’s diagnosis in an effort to raise more awareness.
Martinez, 29, shared a video clip inside the hospital operating room on Instagram and TikTok that shows her husband breaking the news to her.
“My first reaction was, ‘What? Like, there’s no way because nothing was out of the ordinary. They would have probably seen that in ultrasounds,'” Martinez recalled in an interview with “Good Morning America.”
“He noticed, because Micah, he was so swollen, because from birth — the features of Down syndrome are more accentuated, like the almond-shaped eyes, the no nose bridge, they have a neck fold — so things like that were just kind of more accentuated, and Abe noticed right away.”
“The nurse kind of nodded and confirmed that she also agreed that he looked like he had Down syndrome. And then I was just kind of quiet just waiting for them to bring me him, and Abe was quiet as well. And then when he came over, he was just like, I don’t even know the words that he said, but I just remember telling him, ‘He’s gonna be fine. It’s gonna be OK,'” Martinez continued.
Martinez, a former special education teacher, says she is an advocate. I think when I became Micah’s mom, I became an advocate,” she shared.
“I just chose to share those clips because I thought it was helpful and I thought there’s a lot of people probably going through the same thing that we did,” Martinez continued.
“And in that video, I just said, ‘Your feelings are valid,’ because I don’t know if it could really be shown in like a 30-second clip, but we had an array of emotions. It was like, surprise, confusion, happiness, peace, but you know, like sadness for him also, because we knew he had a long journey ahead of him.”
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“His outlook looks great. We expect him to do everything that our daughter would do. Like, we are not gonna treat him differently,” Martinez said. “We’re definitely not going to ignore that he has Down syndrome, and we’re going to celebrate that, but we expect the same things from him that we would expect from Mackenzie. We expect him to go to school and to learn, to do his best and we expect him to go to college and to get a career and to work for a living.”
Micah, who is now 2, is active and energetic, despite having hypotonia, or low muscle tone, according to his mom. “He’s a ball of fire. He has a lot of energy. He definitely keeps me on my toes,” Martinez said. “He loves when we dance and sing, and he loves when we read books to him. He says hi to everyone in the grocery store. So he’s very social.”
“Micah brings so much blessing to our life. He’s an integral part of our family. We absolutely love him,” she added.
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