It’s been a long time since I thought about those first few days with my daughter. Actually, that’s a lie. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the encephalocele, that pesky bit of brain matter growing out of the back of her head. The still-growing scar on her misshapen skull makes damn sure of that.
It’s always peeking out, just below her curls.
I wonder what she’ll think of that, someday, when she realizes that she’s not quite like the other kids. I know there will come a day when she hates it, another when she accepts it, and another when she realizes just how grave a situation it was… and what a miracle it is that she is still around today.
I know enough, thanks to my nursing background, to know what an absolute miracle it is that she’s walking around, talking, and demanding that I paint her bedroom pink. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank her for showing me the way, for helping me find my light, and for using that light to help others.
She’s the reason we, this Motley Band, are here. She’s the sole reason that this site, which has helped so many, exists. Without her, I’d just be some blogger with a blog that I use to pontificate about the underrepresentation of kumquats in today’s media. I’d still be Your Aunt Becky, but I wouldn’t have done this. Any of this.
In her short life, she has altered the path of so many. In her three small years, she has done so much more than I ever will.
While I could sit here, raging against her birth defect – which has given me a wicked case of PTSD – I don’t. I celebrate it. I celebrate that one tiny bit of brain that has changed the course of my life forever.
Today, I ask you to share your stories of birth defects, birth trauma and birth injury. There are so many of us out there in the shadows, waiting to share how their lives have been changed with a few small words, a diagnosis.
The greatest stories remain untold, of course, not from a desire to tell them, but from a lack of an understanding ear.
In here, in this cozy library, fire crackling in the background, as we sit on overstuffed leather chairs, we are ready to lend you our ears.
Forty-five years ago, I came into this world after the expected length of time with all 10 fingers and all 10 toes. New-baby plump, pink, and hollering out my displeasure at being squeezed out of my warm, comfy spot. I was the fourth child in my family; the first two girls were fine, the third did not survive past his premature birth.
The fifth, my brother, arrived some three and a half years after I did, hale and hearty.
I was born broken.
Only no one could see it: it was on the inside. Within hours it became apparent something was wrong. I was not keeping formula down, I couldn’t tolerate my mother’s breast milk, formula, formula substitutes of any kind. I did not have a single bowel movement.
Tests were run, x-rays were taken.
Turns out I had the congenital defect, “Hirschsprung’s Disease.” A major part of my intestine, to put it simply, did not have nerves and therefore didn’t work.
When I was two weeks old I had my first surgery. Between a third and a half of my large intestine was removed and a colostomy was performed. There are a multitude of photos of me with both a diaper applied the standard way and one wrapped around my tummy over the colostomy opening. My mother became very adept at doing massive amounts of laundry. This is before the era of disposable diapers.
Over the course of the next several months, I had multiple abdominal surgeries.
At the ripe old age of 7 months, it was time to put me “back together.” They operated on me once again and did a re-anastomosis. A re-anastomosis is a surgery that re-connects the remaining colon to the portion of the colon near the rectum. A re-anastomosis was performed so that the colostomy can be closed and I could begin to have regular bowel movements.
My first memory is from when I was seven months old. I have shared this memory with my mother, with whom I haven’t really talked much about things other than the above. I remember lying in a crib, my legs spread and ankles tied to the crib bars, and my wrists tied as well. I remember laying there just looking at my mother through the bars of the crib.
Not upset, not crying, just looking at her.
She’s told me that this exact moment did, in fact, take place. That I was calm and accepting of whatever happened. She explained that I had to be kept perfectly still after the re-anastomosis surgery because, back then, they had to apply clamps to the “seam” where the intestine was put back together. These clamps were inserted through the anus and could NOT be removed or dislodged or the seam would come apart. The clamps would fall off when the seam was sufficiently sealed and the tissue was not as swollen anymore.
Thankfully, this is no longer a necessary part of re-anastomosis surgery.
For a few years after this, I would continue to have follow up surgeries for scar repair, another infection and incisional hernia. And it took years – well into elementary school (which is another story) – for me to learn how to control my bowels.
I don’t know what it’s like to not have a roadmap of scars on my belly. For one surgery they even opened me from the back, putting the incision in the crack of my bum. This is just my reality.
I’ve had additional surgeries, mostly related to the massive amount of scar tissue from my surgeries as I was an infant. I ended up having a complete hysterectomy (I was only 24 years old – I’m honestly still dealing with that loss).
But I’m alive. My parents told me the doctors said it’d be a miracle if I lived past 10 years of age. They didn’t tell me this until after I was well past 10 years old… and now I’m 45. I guess it all worked.
To top it all off, I was born in southern New Mexico to a dirt farmer and his wife in the 60’s. Imagine the empty rattling when one shook the coffers. My family reached out to the March of Dimes, and they were wonderful to us. There wasn’t a children’s hospital in southern New Mexico so all these surgeries and medical care took place at the nearest one – in Denver, CO! The March of Dimes covered many costs for my mother and I to fly back and forth, the costs at the hospital and the surgeries.
Thankfully, my level of Hirschsprung’s was a fairly mild one. I was lucky. Most babies with this disease have much more severe issues and more extensive damage/surgical needs.
Some babies with Hirschsprung’s even face mortality at birth or soon after.
I’m still broken in other ways, but in this, I am a survivor.
Aunt Becky’s daughter, Amelia, is the sole reason that The Band exists. Amelia, like so many of our children, was born with a birth defect called an encephalocele. She’s gone on to vigorously beat neurosurgery and the odds stacked firmly against her.
So it’s time to Band Back Together for Birth Defects. Share your stories. Tell your tales. We need to learn about the birth defects that have touched YOUR life. Let’s rock out and tell the world OUR stories.
It’s YOUR turn, The Band!
She was born in September. It was hot. And in 12 weeks, we would be speaking a new language.
My baby was just 2 days old when we learned that our “perfect” world was not to be. My whole life I dreamed of motherhood. It’s what I wanted to do, more than anything. Be a good mom. Raise a family. Teach a little person about my faith.
Rewind to my college days – I was one of those students that changed majors more than once. First I was going to be a teacher; I majored in elementary education. Then after two summers directing a summer camp, I learned that wasn’t really for me. I wasn’t a fan of the parental drama.
Then I was an accounting major. I was going to be a CPA. Then I realized I needed more and ended up an accounting minor with a business administration major in both finance and marketing.
But none of that told me what I wanted to do with my life.
All I cared about was that someday I was going to get to be a mom.
I married my high school sweetheart. We’ve been together since 1992. We got married. Got jobs and got ready to have the “perfectly perfect normal life” that we’d always planned. God has a funny sense of humor sometimes.
And then almost 3 years after we got married, 11 years after we first met, we had Natalie.
And then in 2 days, our world was rocked.
Her bilirubin level of 22 just would not go down.
Our family doctor made the decision to send her to a bigger hospital in a bigger city. He told us that his ego was small enough that he knew that she could get better care and more answers there. The ambulance drove away, and we felt terribly alone. She was whisked away to a NICU and our baptism into a world of medicine was begun.
Our baptism was truly begun with a Baptism.
Natalie was taken to a NICU in a town an hour away from where she was born.
My baby sister Bridget was taken from the same hospital to an ICU just 21 years before, after she was born. She never returned home.
I know that was on my dad’s mind.
My baby sister was born with Transposition of the Great Vessels. She lived 7 days. She was operated on by a fantastic surgeon, who just happened to be the very same surgeon who would perform our daughter Natalie’s very first surgery, a cholangiogram.
The surgeon did his fellowship at Children’s Memorial in Chicago. This same place where Natalie would someday have her liver transplant.
So many coincidences…
Our NICU surgeon made the comment to us that is the title of this entry, “We think it’s Biliary Atresia, but that’s really bad so hopefully that’s not it…”
I don’t hold a single ounce of ill will toward the man. Natalie’s case confused everyone.
She was born with a gallbladder. Albeit a shriveled, ugly, non-working gallbladder. But a gallbladder, nonetheless. And that’s just not common in Biliary Atresia.
In “classic” biliary atresia, by the time most kids are born, their bile duct structure (gallbladder included) has shriveled up and is not working. But Natalie was born 5 weeks early, and it’s a progressive disease – meaning it gets worse as time goes by.
Back to my dad. He’d seen things end badly for his child. I know he had his grandbaby’s soul in mind when he told me that we needed to baptize her.
I am a Catholic.
New babies = Baptism is second nature for me. But the reality of this was too much to bear. I’d had the story of Bridget’s birth and death memorized. I was 4 when she died. Her death is my very first memory. Her death prepared me for my future role, of that I am now certain. But in that moment, I could not face it.
Here I was 2 days after the birth of my child.
I’d had pre-eclampsia. I was induced just two days before following 35 weeks of pregnancy. I was a swollen, puffy blob, having gained 30 pounds in the last month of my pregnancy alone. My husband said that the moment I gave birth to our daughter, my blood pressure had skyrocketed to 250/204. No joke. I was given magnesium to prevent a stroke or a seizure.
My mind was so fuzzy.
I was still in shock.
I wanted my “normal” life back!
I was in denial.
This wasn’t happening.
Why was my dad suggesting that we baptize my baby? Did he think she was going to die? I dug my heels in. (At least I tried to. I could only fit my fat feet into a chewed up pair of black sandals – that my German Shepherd had gotten ahold of.)
So my dad did the good dad thing. He did the responsible thing. He overruled me.
He called our dear friend, the priest. He had been the priest at our church when Jason and I met (we met at church, have I mentioned that?). In walked my dad and the priest, through the sliding NICU doors and over to Natalie’s bassinet. I watched it in slow motion. I remember it in slow motion. I don’t even think I have any pictures of the moment that is forever etched in my mind.
At the time of Natalie’s first surgeries, we had not created a website for our kid, Facebook was not around, and MySpace was a name I called my bedroom. What I am saying is that I did not document my thoughts and feelings at that time, the way that I do now. Not that you would have wanted me to. You see, for the first 3 weeks of Natalie’s life, we lived in our home and visited our baby in the NICU.
We did not know in the beginning that Biliary Atresia would be Natalie’s final diagnosis. She began her stay in the NICU under the UV lights, like any other jaundice case. We’d work on “normal” things, like trying to get her to eat. The first day it was 15 ml every 3 hours, then 20ml, then we finally worked up to a whopping 30 ml. I was encouraged, cheered on even, to keep breastfeeding. And so I did. It gave me a purpose. A sense of control.
And when you can’t control anything, you’ll control that one thing with everything you’ve got.
I took to it like a champ. Strike that. I took to pumping like a champion dairy cow. I focused on finding ways to increase my milk production levels. I found special teas marketed themselves as “Mother’s Milk” tea. My loving husband was my biggest advocate. We’d walk down a long hall, into some section of the hospital that was no longer in use, except for the rare nursing mother pumping session. There was a room with 3 old chairs, a sink, paper towels and soap (for keeping supplies clean) and outlet. Not much more, except for some posters donated by a La Leche League USA. I’d plug my Medela Pump into the wall, take a seat on the old metal chair that was missing chunks of vinyl on the seat, and watch the milk rise in the bottles, feeling victorious as the ounces would climb higher and higher, knowing this was for my girl. The aches I felt, sitting hunched over, were worth it. This was for Natalie. This was making her stronger, this I could do.
After a few days, they did a full blood work-up. Her GGT level was around 1700 (normal is 5 – 55), letting the doctors know that something else was wrong.
They’d take her for an ultrasound. “Inconclusive.” She was born with a gallbladder, after all, and was stumping them.
After this happened 3 times, she had a HIDA scan, and then an open cholangiogram and also a biopsy, all on the day that she turned 2 weeks old.
That’s when our surgeon met with us and drew on a paper towel what we were looking at.
He had opened Natalie up, injected dye, and then tilted the table to watch the flow of the dye. And that’s when he said that he hoped that this wasn’t Biliary Atresia. He and the Pediatric GI attending to us in the NICU, both referred us to a wonderful team of doctors at Children’s Memorial in Chicago. And in the meantime, the biopsy slides were sent to Mayo clinic.
Mayo’s answer came back “Biliary Atresia.” But all other local doctors disagreed. So we got the slides back and took them with us to Children’s Memorial.
When we arrived in Chicago, it was like no place we’d ever been. There were bright colors everywhere. There were multiple waiting rooms with lively fish swimming in tanks. We were escorted to an examination room on the first floor. We thought that we must have been in the wrong place. There were no plaques or diplomas oh the wall. We met two doctors and told them we’d hear the term “breastfeeding jaundice.” The awesome doc, the head of the pediatric gastroenterology at the hospital, gave me a look like I’d just crawled out of a cave. “That is a myth. We’ve disproved it.” OK, I thought. Not going down THAT road with him. I had just had my first lecture by a genius, and I wasn’t a fan of lectures. But it let me know that we were in the right place. They knew their stuff. And above all else, they forbid me to feel guilty.
The fellow (also a doctor, so many levels of hierarchy at the hospital) took the slides and reviewed them. He asked the genius doctor to review them. Their first review said that she may have Cystic Fibrosis. They said it just did not present like “typical biliary atresia.” And so, sweat tests were done = “negative” was the answer. Genetic tests were sent away, and those took 6 weeks to get back. 6 long weeks of desperate waiting. The results came back negative.
After we had left the NICU, we waited for the other shoe to drop. We were still waiting. We waited for the bad news that we knew would come. Every inconclusive answer left me feeling more and more frantic. Genius doctor had told us that for a Kasai Procedure, the procedure to treat Biliary Atresia, to be most successful it must be done by the time the child is 12 weeks old.
The clock kept ticking.
Just a few days later we returned to Children’s and during a follow-up exam, Natalie happened to have a dirty diaper. Genius doctor took one look at it and re-diagnosed her with Biliary Atresia.
Who knew the answer was in the poop?
She was admitted and had another biopsy; it was again inconclusive. The kid is consistent. She then had another cholangiogram, this time a percutaneous type, which was then followed by a Kasai Operation on December 19 of that year. She was 11 weeks old. We’d gotten her surgery in by the time she turned 12 weeks.
Her new surgeon (also a genius), called hers a case of “correctable Biliary Atresia.” We’d learn later that things are not always what they seem and rarely are they as simple sounding as something called “correctable.” But, for the moment, we had an answer.
She got to come home on Christmas Eve.
Little would we know that within a year she would be listed for a liver transplant. I could not have guessed at this point that when she turned 17 months old that I would be giving part of my life to her.
Fourteen and a half years ago, our lives changed forever.
We had already suspected that something was not quite right with Anna. She had stopped nursing after a few days. I assumed that it was my fault, and since I was afraid that she was hungry, switched to formula and bottle feeding. She did well with that for a few days, but then it seemed like a challenge just to get her to drink an ounce. We called the nurses on the maternity floor where she was born and were reassured that she probably just had gas and an upset stomach because of the switch and not to worry.
I was still worried, but we had our first postnatal pediatrician appointment the next day (July 25), so I knew we would get answers then.
In the meantime, I received a phone call from someone from the state of Michigan. I’m not sure – my memories of that are vague. I remember that she told me that Anna had potentially tested positive for one of the disorders in the newborn screening test, and we should go to the hospital to get blood drawn to confirm it.
I was concerned, but still focused on our doctor’s visit.
When we went to see Dr. Simms, her pediatrician at the time, as soon as we were called back to the exam room, she greeted me, looked Anna over, then excused herself to get one of the other doctors.
I guess she wasn’t sure how I would react to what she would tell me next.
When they returned, she explained that Anna had tested positive for maple syrup urine disease (MSUD), it was very serious, and she was very sick. T
he only specialist in the state who saw patients was located at University of Michigan: we were expected down there and we needed to leave as soon as possible. I remember that her southern accent was soothing and the other doctor gently held my shoulders and guided me to a chair, but my mind was in a fog. I didn’t understand… Anna was born healthy. Both of her Apgar scores were 9. That meant we were supposed to live happily ever after.
Right?
Right???
At the time, Lance was working at Hafer Hardware, and it was lunch time. Dr. Simms allowed me to use the phone in her office to call him. I called the store, but he had just left for lunch. And of course, this was before we had cell phones. I’m sure it was only a few minutes before he finally called back, but it seemed like an eternity.
After reaching him, Anna and I headed home to pack before we headed to Ann Arbor.
On the drive to U of M I poured over my “What to Expect” book. MSUD wasn’t in there. I had heard of it, but only as an ailment of a serial killer in a crime novel I had read, not as a real disease.
When we got to the ER at U of M, Dr. Allen, a neurologist who treated patients with MSUD, and a gaggle of med students crowded into the small room. I remember that he removed Anna’s diaper and passed it around for the students to smell. He then took a swab of her earwax for them to smell. We were completely flabbergasted… what did he think he was doing?
We didn’t realize he was doing it to show the students that both smelled like they had been smothered in Aunt Jemima’s.
You see, there were signs that Anna had MSUD, but we never picked up on them.
She had a very high-pitched, shrill cry, but we joked that she’d sing opera someday. By the time she was 3 days old, she tensed her muscles so tightly she rolled herself over. We bragged that we had a wonder baby who was months ahead developmentally. Her diaper smelled sweet and syrupy.
We chalked it up to being new parents, and being so in love we thought her dirty diapers smelled good.And what we thought was fussiness with the bottle and me not being confident in nursing was actually because her brain had swelled so much that she lost the suck and swallow reflex.
By the time we were in PICU, she had an IV in her scalp because she was so dehydrated that it was the only blood vessel they could use. She had an NG tube giving her nutrition. She was hooked up to heart monitors and pulse-ox monitors. She looked so tiny and helpless there in the bed. We’d never felt so helpless as parents as we did then.
That day is one of the few times I’ve seen my husband break down and sob.
What information we were given about MSUD over the past few days was overwhelming. Most of the official definitions included two very frightening likely outcomes: mental retardation and death.
The prospect of having a child with a restricted low-protein diet was daunting as well. Would we need to become vegetarians, too? If we wanted to eat meat, would we need to hide it from her, making late night drive-thru runs to satisfy our cravings? Those fears seem so trivial now, but they were so real to us then.
Over the next two weeks, Anna got stronger.
After she got out of the PICU, she was moved to a regular room. After she regained some weight and was able to take feedings by bottle, we were able to come home.
She was sent home with the NG tube, as she was still taking about a quarter of her formula that way. Shortly after we got home from the hospital, she grabbed the NG tube and pulled it out, flinging stomach acid all over me. I should have known then that it would serve as foreshadowing for how the next thirteen years would go!
Thankfully, we were able to remove the tube after a week.
As I think back to those days, I also look ahead to what faces us.
When it comes time for her liver transplant, I know that we will face long days in the hospital full of tears, hope, fear, and prayers. The big difference will be that this time, we will be filled with hope.
Hope that although we will be entering a new chapter full of uncertainty, we will be free of the fear that MSUD has caused over the past 14 years.
When I was young, I always hated gym. I was never good at it. The running and the throwing of things was just never my bag. I was always short of breath and sometimes even came close to fainting. I always chalked it up to being a fat little kid who was grossly unathletic.
I lived for ninth grade because I only had to take a semester of gym and then it would be over forever, or at least until I got to college. I finished 9th grade and gladly went on my merry gym-free way.
Fast forward to 2007.
I had been out of high school and was in my third year of college. I began experiencing back pain, the likes of which I had never felt. I finally went to the doctor, and while the Nurse Practitioner was listening to my heart, she looked up and asked “You have a heart murmur, don’t you?”
I had never heard such a thing.
After tests, including one where they sedated me, shoved a “probe” down my throat, and looked at my heart (after which I cried for want of a cheeseburger), I was diagnosed with a regular heart murmur with Mitral Valve Regurgitation (which I described to people as “my heart pukes”) and Sub-Aortic Stenosis.
Some time later (2010-ish) my dad, who has CHD, began having Atrial Fibrilation episodes.
He eventually got in to see the doctor his brothers go to, and we loaded up to see if he could fix my dad’s bum ticker.
The next phase of the story I wrote about earlier in this post. During this time I was re-diagnosed with a condition called Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy or HCM for short.
All of the things that I had experienced as a kid, all of the shortness of breath while running, all of the blacking out in PE episodes – they all made sense now (granted, they still don’t account for my athletic abilities or lack thereof).
After my diagnosis, I was scared. I began taking my drugs like a good little girl and prepared myself. I scheduled an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) implantation for July, the month after my dad got his. I recovered just in time to return to work for the school year, and I am feeling better than ever.
After all of that worry and fear I have come to realize some things.
Not every 25 (almost 26) year old can say that she is battery operated.
Before any of this happened, I used to tell my students that I had a plastic heart; now I (sort of) have a metal one.
I tell people that I am part computer, or even bionic.
I make sick jokes about being shocked all the time.
My dad and I even joke about starting a doo-wop group with 2 of his brothers who have ICDs called The Pacers.
I never knew that having HCM and an ICD could be such a source of amusement. I even love to freak people out by letting them touch it under my skin. There is nothing better than the slightly horrified look on someone’s face when they touch the hard, metal rectangle on my chest.
In the end, the laughter and the jokes far outweigh the fear and uncertainty that I had before I got the surgery.
Plus, I hope that in the 6-10 years that it will take for me to need a replacement, they will have integrated an MP3 player into the device.
My son is now 10 weeks old. He has a congenital heart defect and severe birth defects, limb differences with all four limbs affected.
I’m here now because I have a story to tell, a story with infinite ellipses and a looming question mark. It’s just the beginning of a story, really.
But does the story about my new son start the day he was born? Or the week before when we learned he had profound defects and would likely not survive? Or the start of my pregnancy when I learned he was one of three, two of whom did not remain viable?
I think to get the most understanding of who this boy is, what he means to us, I have to back up even more.
My older children are almost thirteen and nearly six. I joke about the seven year age gap being one of the “best kept secrets” of family planning, but there really wasn’t any planning involved. The big space, while wonderfully beneficial and I wouldn’t change it now for anything, wasn’t the result of careful decision making, but rather inexplicable secondary infertility. I always imagined myself as the wisecracking mom to a passel of feisty kids. I wanted the rowdy chaos of a big family. But my quirky biology didn’t comply.
I lost a pregnancy early in the second trimester, about four and a half years ago. I’ve had a number of very early miscarriages, which were disappointing, but nothing like the devastation of losing one after crossing into the proverbial “safe zone.” That loss resulted in lingering complications. It was a difficult time to live in my own body.
So when I found myself surprisingly expecting back in the early spring of this year, it was hard to believe. It was hard to tell myself that it was true, let alone to tell anyone else. It was too fantastic.
I felt like maybe I could protect the idea of it and make it stay real somehow by not breathing it aloud to others. And then I started bleeding. And I bled constantly for over a month, during which I learned I was losing two tiny embryos. How ironic that years of wonky fertility would find me knocked up spontaneously with three, each in a separate sac? But the irony turned around on itself, like a mobius strip, and it was a pregnancy loss after all.
There were weeks of not knowing if it would be a total loss or not.
When the bleeding stopped, there was one scrappy baby, holding on in there.
And suddenly, I was the caretaker of this tremendous and wonderful news. It was too unreal and too thrilling to me to want to share the news.
How could I tell anyone that I was pregnant and have them possibly understand what that could mean to me? Of course, such knowledge comes up organically, in conversations and double-takes (is she or isn’t she?), and it didn’t stay my sweet secret for long. But, even once the word started getting out, I didn’t make a deal of it.
I didn’t tell Facebook (also, fuck Facebook. while we’re at it.) and I didn’t make any grand announcements.
You’d think if I was so happy about it, I’d want to sing a song from the roof and do a mass postcard mailing, but it was just too precious to expect anyone else to appreciate, and I felt very protective.
Once the high drama of the first trimester passed, it was a long dull slog through ill-fitting pants and raspberry leaf tea and heartburn.
I had delightfully warm and chatty visits with my homebirth midwife; we organized the house and checked off an industrious home improvement To Do list; there was only completely glad anticipation.
I had what I hoped would be my last prenatal appointment on November 2nd, which was also my “due date”. My midwife didn’t feel certain about the baby’s position and had me zip down to an imaging clinic for a quick ultrasound. I had a lot of anxiety on the drive. I was down to the wire, for sure, and didn’t have any time to flip a breech baby.
The ultrasound tech saw right away that baby was head up. I sighed and tried to remain cool.
I’ve got this, I thought. Maybe the baby won’t have the exact birth we’d been planning, but it’ll be okay.
And then the tech asked me to wait in the room. I was confused by this, and called my husband. “Baby’s breech” I told him when he answered, “but it’s a baby in there, not, like a cat or something. I saw the head and I think the hands.” And then he asked me, “the right number of fingers?” And then I had to hang up quickly, the tech was coming back with someone else.
I was introduced, in that small dark ultrasound room, to an older man, the radiologist. He shook my hand and then blurted out, “Your baby has multiple abnormalities.”
He said the baby had deformed limbs, missing fingers, probably missing other parts. I could barely hear him from this whooshing sound suddenly throbbing in my head. I stood up and grabbed my bag. “I don’t know the words to say,” I remember saying. And that’s all I said. I walked out of the room, walked past the waiting area and said to my big girl, contentedly reading a book by a window, “We’re leaving now,” as I walked out the door.
I know by the time I got into the car I was crying. I know that I tried explaining to my daughter why I was crying, except I didn’t know. I know that I called my husband and somehow told him.
I know that my midwife called me and told me not to drive myself home. I know that I told her I’d be fine. I’m fine. It’s fine. Fine.
I know that I kept telling myself I can’t crash the car because I have to take care of my daughter.
I know that by the time I got home, about forty-five minutes away, my husband was also there.
I know that we left almost immediately to the city, where somehow I’d been fast-tracked into an appointment at a maternal fetal medicine clinic for a level II ultrasound and an amniocentesis to see what congenital birth defects that he had.
I know that I cried all the way there.
What happened next is we learned this baby we’d been expecting all along had “significant” and “profound” birth defects, in and out. We learned he was a boy.
We learned that he had syndromes that were considered “incompatible with life.”
Two days after that appointment, we had a consultation with a neonatologist and a meeting with the hospital ethics committee. Maybe you already knew that hospitals have ethics committees, but I did not. By this time, our baby’s file had been shared with a multitude of specialists who carefully analyzed his congenital birth defects.
The neonatologist told us that she did not think it would be unreasonable for us to proceed with an out-of-hospital birth. By which she meant, there is not a lot they can do for this baby, so maybe you just want to spend his last moments peacefully at home.
We were braced for the worst. The best was still very bad. Based on his rare and complex congenital birth defects, all best guesses determined that the likelihood of him having severe neurological impairment was very, very high.
Would he be able to eat?
Breathe?
Hear?
The ethics committee gave us their veritable stamp of approval, entrusting us wholly with all decisions. We discussed how long we would continue support for our child? What kind of support? I learned the phrase “palliative care”.
There was one week in between my world falling apart and his birth. One week of such deep despair I won’t even begin to describe it. One week of waiting for him to be born so he could die and we could say goodbye.
One week of listening to Pearl Jam’s Just Breathe over and over and over again, like some kind of prayer.
Among our ethics committee approved plan was my insistence on avoiding a C-Section. I don’t suppose that the hospital sees a lot of vaginal breech births. Probably fewer Pitocin-induced vaginal breech births. I also was firm about refusing fetal monitoring. Did I want to hear the heartbeat of a baby who would not live?
No.
And while my other babies were born triumphantly without pain relief of any kind, I assumed I would need something to get me through this dreadful thing I had to do. In the end, though, the drug made labor so hard and fast and intense, I was out of my mind with the hurt of it all and did not have time nor wits to request pain medication.
I say that not out of pride, for there is nothing to be proud about what was the darkest moment of my life, but just to illustrate what an unusual birth it was.
Everything about this boy has been unusual.
There was no tender welcoming a new life into the world. He was zipped across the hall, neonatologist and NICU nurses and cardiologist and geneticist and who the hell else at the ready, to check out his birth defects. I turned my head away and didn’t even want to see him go.
We heard him cry. It was a confusing sound. We thought he would need intubation. It was assumed that his heart defect would prohibit his lungs from working efficiently.
But he was crying.
And they brought him back to me. And they said he was healthy.
And I held his tiny broken body and I nursed him and he latched on better than my other babies latched on as newborns.
And I cried.
I cried because he wasn’t dead and I cried because he was alive. No one mentioned the possibility of leaving the hospital with a disabled baby. How do you even prepare for such a thing? There is no preparation. There is only disbelief.
His stay in the NICU was brief, just over a day, for monitoring. This little champ maintained a near perfect blood oxygen level, despite his heart defect. He’ll need surgery sooner than later to repair his broken heart. The pediatric cardiologist explained it as a common congenital defect, a routine surgery. But in my world, there is nothing common or routine about open heart surgery for a brand new baby.
Prior to this roller coaster, the most serious medical situation my family experienced was that time my daughter had stitches by her eye eleven years ago. How’s that for contrast?
How do I tell you about this baby?
I do not want the sum of him represented by what he is not, what he is missing, the challenges that await us.
But what else is there yet?
His issues are not minor. His bilateral leg condition alone occurs approximately once in every one million live births. He will never walk without serious, invasive surgeries and devices. Amputations. Prostheses.
Do you know what a mindfuck it is to hear such words about a newborn?
Can you feel the weight of this?
My big boy, the bouncy one, the easy-going one, the boy with the casual shrug of his shoulders, mentions his baby brother’s hands like it’s the most obvious, simple thing ever. “He only has three fingers on one hand,” he says, “and two fingers on the other one.” So matter of fact. No catch in his throat. No mourning the loss of future handprint turkeys or making the motions to so many kid songs.
I’m not there yet.
I’ve been looking at and loving on those tiny malformed hands for fourteen days now and it’s still hard for me, even as they tell me “it’s just mechanics” and “he’ll figure it out” and other encouraging platitudes.
I am usually so guarded and private. It’s out of character for me to share so much here, even as I’ve intentionally omitted specific diagnoses (a grouping of several, with no umbrella catch-all for them all together as of this point). But everything is different now. Since we’ve been home from the hospital, I’ve been hiding. A few people have met this surprising baby, but we haven’t yet left the house, save for doctor appointments.
I can’t hide indefinitely. I will have to be brave and bold enough to withstand whatever questions and curiousness occurs when the world meets Ulysses.
He looks an awful lot like his big sister did as a newborn. Same deep eyes, same frowny mouth. When he’s all wrapped up in a blanket, you would never know that he has such serious things going on. And I can assure you that he does not know. Everything else about him is just what you’d expect from any newly born babe. He squirms and fusses.
He makes those mysterious sleep smiles. He flails his arms when a loud sound startles him. His brain seems normal. Everything else about him seems normal.
There is nothing normal about our life now.
We have so many appointments scheduled. He has already had more doctors examine him than maybe my other two children, myself and my husband have ever had, all together. I don’t know how to get used to living such a highly medically managed lifestyle.
It’s been just three weeks since everything changed. So much information to process in such a short amount of time. I’ve blamed myself incessantly, even as I know there was nothing I did or did not do to cause this. That is the absolute truth, and yet, I worry that people will wonder… of course they will. People with murky knowledge of genetics, people who have grown lazy in their own good fortune, people who can’t possibly know how wanted and treasured this little baby has been all along.
Everyone’s delighted that he survived the birth, that he is thriving.
And yes! What a great outcome!
But now what?
Since I wrote that, we have laid out a plan for open heart surgery (soon) and orthopedic surgery (before his first birthday). He is growing plump and smiley.
