Born with only one developed kidney, 1-year-old Cain Hawkins’ family and friends rose to the occasion of walking with over 7,500 walkers, and as a collective team for Cain’s Crew raised $3,400 for the National Kidney Foundation of Michigan.
Cain was born with kidney dysplasia, a condition where one or both of a baby’s kidneys don’t develop normally while they are growing in the womb. They discovered the kidney problem, thinking it was initially a blockage, when Cain’s mother, Dionne Fitch, 37, of Novi, was pregnant.
Fitch said during her pregnancy she and her fiancé, Clarence Hawkins – Cain’s father – were under the assumption that when Cain was born it would be a routine procedure of removing the blockage and everything would be fine.
“At the same time the chief pediatric urologists at Children’s Hospital were letting us know that a month after Cain was born he would go through a series of tests needed to make sure what exactly the blockage was,” said Fitch.
In succinct timing, a month after Cain was born, tests were performed and Fitch and Hawkins waited in great anticipation for the test results. Fitch said that she and Hawkins were taken back to the doctor’s office for the results and that’s when they were informed that Cain’s left kidney wasn’t functioning at all.
“There were no activity in it, and it basically was a foreign object in his body. It had stopped growing during my pregnancy, so the blockage they actually saw was basically the end of the kidney,” said Fitch. “We were in complete shock sitting there. That was never something that was told to us, but again, we didn’t know until he was born what actually we were dealing with.”
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