Celebrating mom

That Kim Helmly Cosby will spend Mother's Day with family and friends isn't very unique.

The path she took to get there is.

In 1997, after 14 years of marriage, Cosby decided she wanted to have a child. She stopped taking her birth control pills and two months later she was pregnant.

At the time she had been getting treated for what was thought to be stomach ulcers. A few months into her pregnancy doctors determined she had developed Crohn's disease. The problem continued through the pregnancy and escalated once the child was born.

Cosby spent the first year of her daughter's life practically bed ridden and unable to care for Stormie Heather Cosby. Cosby said she was hospitalized 11 times that year and was fed intravenously.

"I had to take a backpack home once that was wired to feed me stuff that looked like a milkshake," said Cosby, who spent most of her Thursday decorating Harlem Methodist Church for the Third Annual Mother-Daughter Banquet.

Things got worse for Cosby before they could get better.

Doctors spent most of 1998-99 searching for the right medicine to give her. She said it turned into a race to see what would get to her first, the right medication or death.

The problem was she was having allergic reactions to each medication she was given. She said she even had allergic reaction to the medicine she was being given for the first reaction.

"The doctors labeled me as very unusual," she said.

At one point she got so close to death she told her husband to take care of Stormie, but she said, she wasn't ready to give up.

"She was my reason to fight to live," said Cosby, while hugging her 4-year old daughter. "God knew I had to have her to live. I had to keep thinking of her."

To make matters more difficult, Cosby's mother got diagnosed with breast cancer. Cosby said the two women were going to the hospital and get their needed treatment at the same time. Cosby would get four hours of IV treatment and her mother would get chemotherapy.

"We were helping one another when we both needed help," Cosby said.

Sitting in the nursery room of Harlem Methodist Church while stroking the hair of her daughter, Cosby, now divorced, knows she's lucky to be alive. More important, she said, she's lucky to be a mother.

"The doctor's said it was a wonder I got pregnant. Then, it was a wonder that I was able to carry Stormie," she said. "We call her my miracle baby."