PENDLETON — When Pendleton firefighter and paramedic Michael Cuneo took a call Dec, 31, 2020, for an infant transport to Portland, he had no idea that infant would become his daughter.
“Transports are a pretty standard thing,” he said. “But then dispatch said it was for a 1-day-old, which made me just a little bit nervous. I was wondering, ‘Why is a 1-day-old being transferred. Are they super sick? What’s going on?’ I maintain my pediatric advanced life support certification, and not everyone does, so I thought, let’s go.”
Michael loaded up for the trip to Portland with his partner and fetched the infant from CHI St. Anthony Hospital, where nurses told him the infant was withdrawing from fentanyl and methamphetamine.
“So I asked, ‘Is mom coming with us?’” Michael said. “They said, ‘There’s no mom.’ Normally mom and baby go hand and hand, so I asked where she was. They told me the mom had shown up and demanded a cesarean section, she said she was done. After she got her cesarean section she just dipped out.”
Michael later learned the infant’s father had gone to the hospital during the labor and provided the mother with narcotics that would contribute to the infant’s withdrawals.
“I thought, let’s get her going. I got sugar water to dip her binky in because she was withdrawing. They were afraid that if I fed her anything she would throw up and then aspirate.”
Knowing the infant girl would get hungry on the road, Michael prepared himself for a long journey of comforting and nurturing the little girl on the way to Portland.
A fateful journey
“About 10 minutes into the drive, she was crying,” Michael said. “I dipped her binky in the water, I took her out of the car seat, I rolled up my sleeve on my left arm and just held her tight. We sat in the chair and I was buckled in and just held her. I started playing worship music on my phone and started singing and praying over her all the way to Portland.”
As the journey went on, Michael became haunted by questions.
What is this? What will happen to this child? Where will this perfect and precious baby go?
At that moment, he said he felt God was telling him this baby girl was his daughter.
Michael and his wife, Ally Jordan Cuneo, had long known someday they would adopt a child, and had kept friends and an active interest in the foster care system. A busy life that involved Michael’s military service with deployments to Afghanistan, and Ally’s education and career as an emergency room nurse kept them from committing before. But now, he said, everything was changing.
“I was just praying over her and just weeping, and I really felt like God was like, ‘Hey, this is your daughter,’” he said. “I knew that was weird, but I thought, OK, God. If that’s what you’re saying, it’s a lot of steps. There are a lot of steps between taking this child to the hospital and bringing the child home, but I knew I would follow that path.”
When they arrived in Portland, they began the transfer of the baby, with Michael explaining to the nurse she’d behaved perfectly, and he’d kept her calm by singing, which he’d done his whole life.
“I told her, if she wasn’t withdrawing, I’d just want to take her home,” Michael said with a laugh. “I asked her for a caseworker number and got a name and number. We drove back to Pendleton that night, and the next morning I called the caseworker.”
The process
Several calls during the next couple of days ended in what Ally described as a “novel-sized mountain of paperwork” to begin the adoption process, which Michael and Ally committed to filling out in a single day. After picking up the paperwork in the morning, they submitted it that evening.
“They want to know what your finances were like growing up, and how you grew up,” Ally said. “They want names, background checks and sexual history. How many partners have you had? How were you raised? What’s your normal daily routine? References. All of that — we did it in six hours.”
Ally, who hadn’t been on the trip to Portland, said when it came to adopting the baby, she trusted his instincts.
“Sometimes you get that gut feeling that this is the right decision, so I thought, alright, we’re jumping in, there was no hesitation,” Ally said. “We filled out the paperwork, got it processed and essentially got three days’ notice that we’d be bringing the baby home under the foster care program.”
It is around that time Michael and Ally learned the baby had in fact been given a name by her mother: Chloe. Now, they said, they were bringing Chloe home.
A new chapter in life
When a baby experiences withdrawal from substances such as fentanyl and methamphetamine, Ally explained, issues can arise due to extreme nerve sensitivity, and she and Michael tried to prepare for any possible complication in Chloe’s development.
“She is just the most loving baby, always wanting snuggles and smiling,” Ally said. “Now she’s in speech therapy, but otherwise, she’s thriving.”
For two and a half years, the Cuneo’s would foster Chloe, but Ally said it took a village in the early days.
“Our support systems, like the fire department, dropped off food, dropped off diapers, we didn’t have any girl clothes,” Ally said. “The hospital sent us home with a tote of outfits in every size to get her through the first year of her life. Other nurses made love boxes for Chloe. The support was incredible.”
Michael said some members of Chloe’s biological family at first wished to keep contact, and as a matter of due diligence on the part of Oregon’s Child Welfare Division, those requests were accommodated. But after two and a half years, it became clear Michael and Ally truly were Chloe’s parents, he said.
As spring dawned on 2023, Ally and Michael received a call: their adoption paperwork had been processed, and it was time to go to court and finalize Chloe’s adoption on Monday, July 24.
“It was amazing, we went and met the judge, he introduced himself to all of us, and we finalized it,” Ally said. “Chloe’s previous chapter is now over, and the chapter of Chloe Madison Cuneo is now just beginning.”
