When Christie Ybarra woke up to get ready for her shift at Denny’s on Halloween and noticed her three-month old baby Bryce had a cough, she never thought it would lead to him being in Phoenix Children’s Hospital with an unknown illness for over a week.  

“He probably needs to go to urgent care because he sounded a little raspy,” Ybarra recalled telling her husband. “I went to work thinking nothing of it. He went to urgent care, and when he got to urgent care, he stopped breathing … the ambulance came straight to Phoenix Children’s Hospital and that’s where we’ve been ever since.”  

Doctors first told Ybarra and her husband, Darmon Therman, that it was Corona Bronchiolitis. However, Ybarra said her infant son’s body should have fought it off in about a day or two — he’s now been in the hospital for over week.  

One of those specialists was a cardiologist to see if it had something to do with his heart. The specialists have also been checking to see if it’s a pneumonia undetectable in x-rays. But they haven’t figured out what ailment the baby boy is battling. 

“Yesterday he had a really bad day, and they actually went up in assistance,” Ybarra said. “So now, instead of just like regular breathing tubes, now he’s on a mask that’s pushing positive air and forcing him to breathe.”  

Ybarra said that baby Bryce has also been placed on a feeding tube, but even that is a struggle as the medical team doesn’t want him to aspirate with such a severe cough.  

“They’re trying to do everything they can,” Ybarra said. “They’re just pulling all strings to try and help him.”  

While the three-month-old has been in the hospital, Therman — who coaches varsity boys’ basketball and defensive linemen at Sequoia Pathway Academy in Maricopa — has been driving back and forth from central Phoenix to take care of the couple’s three other kids and still attend practice for two sports.  

“Our days so far have looked like he’ll leave the hospital around 1 p.m. to go get our kids from school, take them to practice with him because basketball just started,” Ybarra said. “Then he’ll take them to grandma’s house, feed them, get them ready for bed and then he usually gets back to the hospital around 10 or 10:30 p.m.”  

Ybarra said that with Therman being the coach as well as his mom being the principal at Sequoia Pathway the family is very involved in the community.  

“We try to do everything we can for kids that we do have that are involved in the sports, just because I feel like nowadays, there’s a lot more kids that aren’t involved,” Ybarra said. “We try to just kind of push everybody to come join, even the kids that aren’t on the team. We like to host open runs where anybody in the community can just come play for day and just enjoy.”  

Due to Ybarra being at the hospital nonstop since last week the family has started a GoFundMe campaign.  

“There’s been no progress made,” Ybarra said. “So, now even the doctors are kind of saying, ‘Hey, we don’t know.’ Everybody’s just up in the air trying to find answers.”