Two years ago today…
I was lying in my hospital room with empty arms fervently praying for my daughter Rebecca. She had been born at 7:15 am that morning. My uterus had ruptured and she was in my abdomen when they got to her. She was blue and unresponsive and the relentless NICU team finally brought her back after 7 tries. Her condition was too grave for them and they could not stabilize her, they needed to send her to Holden NICU at University of Michigan. She was seizing, having severe Superventricular Tachycardia, and swelling over her entire body among other things. They didn’t think she would make it. The weather was so bad with fog and rain that U of M couldn’t fly their helicopter in, they had to send an ambulance and they are 2 hours south of us. They had 6 hours to get her on what is called a cooling cap. It is an experimental procedure where they cool the head way below normal temperature and the goal is to slow or stop the swelling of the brain. The crew made it to Holden with 30 minutes to spare. It was touch and go for a while. Everyone was very grim, the outcomes of cases with deliveries like Rebecca’s usually isn’t very good. She had no gag or sucking reflex and she was on a ventilator to breathe, the only bright spot at that point was that she could breathe above the vent which is a good thing, it shows that the deep portions at the base of the brain were not totally destroyed.
I remember my husband showing me pictures of her that someone snapped shortly after she was born (they took them so we could have something to remember her by because they didn’t think she would live). She looked so lifeless, there was color in her skin, but her eyes were empty and glassed over. I was shocked, I didn’t say how shocked I was but my husband later told me he could see it in my face. I had been put out under general anesthesia and she had been born for a while by the time I was repaired and woken up so I never got to see her face to face. All I had was these terrible scary pictures.
I can not describe the pain and heartache of having a baby and not being able to see it. It was torture……I wanted to climb the walls, but of course I could barely move. I was given units of blood, and more stuff than I care to remember. It seemed like everytime I would JUST fall asleep from exhaustion someone would come in and poke me and check me, they watched me like a hawk. I was terrified to be alone because I thought I would totally freak out, my guilt and pain was more than I could cope with. The morphine was making me hallucinate and they were frightening hallucinations involving Rebecca.
A lot more crap happened while I was in the hospital, I had an intestinal blockage and they had to insert a Nasogastric tube. That was the most painful thing I’ve ever had done…it was a worse/different kind of pain than my uterus rupturing. When my uterus ruptured I was already delerious from pain and stress and fear, but when that NG went down and it took three tries, I was FULLY conscious. The nurses that were doing it didn’t want to go and make a numbing cocktail for the end of the tube before they inserted it. Forget waterboarding, just jam NG tubes up supsects noses, they’ll talk faster than you can blink your eye!
Finally after 5 days my amazing OB released me into the care of my husband and let me go home. I CRIED I was so happy to get out of that place. All I wanted was to go see my baby!!! I really needed to be on an IV, my electrolytes were so totally whacked out from the blockage and the stomach pumping on top of everything else that it could affect my heart. My Dr. knew that I would get better quicker if he let me go so he gave me strict instructions to drink as much gatorade as I could, and come back and have bloodwork done in 2 days, and I was to IMMEDIATELY go to the ER if I felt the least bit strange.
I got out of the hospital on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday we drove down to visit Rebecca. It was my first time seeing her. It was soooo hard looking at her in the isolette and only being able to touch her through the holes in the sides. WOW We should have been at home, not in that place 2 hours from home, her lying all alone in that plastic box with wires and tubes coming out and going into her everywhere. 
*********** They were saying she wouldn’t walk, talk, eat, hear, or see on her own, that she probably would be a vegetable. She had brain damage to the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes of her brian confirmed on both MRI and CT. They could see that it wasn’t SEVERE global damage (the worst) but that it was definitely there and that they thought it would affect her.
I finally got to hold her when she was 9 days old. She was doing so much better by then. 
They still were saying the prognosis wasn’t that good, that we’d just have to take it one day at a time.
Today she turned TWO… When she finally came home at 18 days old and I put her to my breast she nursed like she’d done it all along. It took many long months of physical, occupational, and now speech therapy, but she walked at 10 1/2 months, and now talks in 3 word sentences. She truly is a MIRACLE BABY.
