When you look at all of Teen Mom, all the people from all the series and all the terrible, traumatic things they’ve all been though …
We still think there’s a good chance that Leah Messer’s story is the saddest.
She was just an average high school student, having fun and being a teenager, when she found herself pregnant after a rebound hookup with a guy she’d just met, Corey Simms.
And not only was she pregnant … she was pregnant with twins.
As if that wasn’t heard enough, months after she gave birth to those two darling baby girls, Gracie and Ali, she began noticing some abnormalities with Ali.
She wasn’t hitting the same milestones that her sister was hitting, and there seemed to be problems with her eyes and feet.
After visiting several doctors, they finally had an answer: Ali had an extremely rare form of muscular dystrophy.
Leah learned that her daughter suffered from a degenerative, terminal disease, and since the form she has is so rare, there’s no real timeline on how slow or fast the disease will progress.
It’s simply unimaginable.
But for the most part, Leah has been dealing with the whole tragic thing with grace and strength, and as we saw in last night’s episode of Teen Mom 2, she’s always ready and willing to fight for what Ali needs.
During the episode, she spoke at length about Ali with her sister, Victoria.
She explained what had been happening with the poor little girl in a previous episode — the one where Ali was rushed to the emergency room because she couldn’t breathe.
“They did testing on everything, her heart, her lungs,” she said. “She does have allergies that are restricting her airways and causing asthma.”
In addition to the troubles she’d been having with her breathing, Leah revealed that Ali had also been falling a lot at school.
“She had mentioned to us that she hadn’t been eating at school and that she was falling a lot,” she said. “She needs somebody with her, by her side, at all times.”
“I’m fighting for Ali,” she insisted. “I’m going to do everything that she needs done. We wanted her to be independent, and at the same time things are becoming more progressive.”
We’ve seen both Leah and Corey struggle with that balance — who could forget their unwillingness to get her in her wheelchair like Ali’s doctor recommended?
And, at the same time, who could really fault them for struggling with all of this?
After Leah’s conversation with her sister, she spoke with some people from Ali’s school, and after that, she spoke to Ali herself.
“Whenever you’re at lunch and you’re going to eat,” she told her, “you’ll have somebody who’ll open your food.”
Because she’d been able to work it out with the school to get an aide, someone to stay with Ali and help her with whatever she needs help with, and hopefully to help keep her from falling so much.
It sounds like it’ll be a big help for her, but as with everything else, we can’t imagine this new development is easy for Leah.