Andrew is graduating 8th grade this year and moving on to high school. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Over the last couple of weeks, I've written Andrew's birth story. I left out a lot of minutiae and copied a bit from a previous post.
Andrew’s Birth Story
On Thursday I fell getting into my car. One of those odd
things where your foot just slips out from under you. I went to the OB, had an
ultrasound, got a clean bill and went on my way. On Saturday night I ate at a Chinese buffet
(this is important). Sunday morning I woke up feeling sick. Really sick. My
stomach was cramping. I called my husband, who worked overnights, and told him
to hurry home because I wanted to go call the doctor. I thought I’d eaten some
bad Chinese at that buffet, but since I’d fallen a few days earlier, I wanted
to go get double-checked. He hurried home, I called the doctor, and the service
said the on-call doc would meet us at the hospital. We hopped in the car and
drove the 20 minutes to the hospital.
Once at the hospital, they put us into a room to wait. There
was no obvious emergency, no real pains; I just felt like crap. I decide I
better go to the bathroom before anyone comes in and I’m stuck in the bed. As I
wipe, I notice blood. The bright red kind. And I start yelling for my husband.
We get a nurse and I get in bed. They’ve told the doctor to hustle. I’m hooked
up to a fetal monitor to get a heart rate and contractions. That cramping I
had? Contractions. Turns out they’re not strong enough to detect on the
monitor, so I’m given a button to push every time I feel one. At this point
everyone realizes that I’m in labor with contractions every 3 or 4 minutes. I
am now admitted to the hospital. On the last day of week 22. In 1998. 24 weeks
is considered viable.
They proceed to pump me full of enough magnesium-sulfate that I
can’t see correctly. It is a muscle relaxer used to stop contractions. Then they add something to calm me down because I’ve just
had the first panic attack of my life. A neonatologist comes in and tells me
that if my baby is born today, it will be dead. At this point I become
hysterical, more drugs come. All the while doctors and nurses keep telling me
to calm down. I need to stay calm if I have any intention of keeping this baby
in. I need to keep him in for 4 weeks. Then I get something to help me sleep.
I’m now on bedrest, but not just any bedrest. I’m kept in trendelenburg. My
feet must remain higher than my head. They’re hoping gravity will keep the baby
in.
12 days later. May 1st, 1998, at 24 weeks 5 days
I start contracting again. The nurse (who was someone I’d never had) tells me
I’m constipated. There is no way I’m in real labor, despite the fact that I’ve
been contracting on and off for a week and a half. She doesn’t call the doctor
and won’t call my husband (I can’t reach the phone). After a couple hours of
this, I start making a real fuss, and she has no choice to get my regular night
nurse who had been in another labor. Luckily, she realizes something is wrong
and gets the OB. They call my husband and tell him to get to the hospital as
fast as possible – he’s at work an hour away, and the room fills with people.
There had to be 10 people in there. Several for me and several for the baby. I
still don’t know if I’m having a boy or girl. It had stopped being important
days ago. I never pushed. Someone asked about extraordinary measures. I said
yes. He, quite literally, slid out. I didn’t even know he was out until someone
told me. It was 6am. They worked for a couple of minutes, and my nurse told me
he was a boy and asked me if I had a name. Andrew. They whisked him away and
all I saw was a purple shape in the isolette. My husband arrived about 20
minutes later.
It felt like days before I was able to see him. In reality
it was a couple of hours. My husband had been able to see him briefly through a
window. I had a Polaroid picture of him. Just in case. Just in case he died
before I got upstairs to the nursery. Since I’d been on bedrest for so long, I
had to be wheeled up to the nursery on a gurney, and that only because I
threatened the staff. No one wanted to be the one blamed if I never got to see
my baby alive. Odd the threats you resort to when under duress. So, off I wheeled,
lying on the gurney. It was shocking to see a baby so small. I had never seen
anything like him and neither had most of the nurses. 1 pound, 11 ounces. 14
inches. He was the youngest baby born at the hospital…ever. He was hooked up to
tubes and monitors under insanely bright warming lights. Machines breathing for
him, checking his heart rate, monitoring his oxygen levels, IVs for fluid and
medicine. His first nurses were Mickey and Laura. Talk about drawing the short
straw. I remember little else from our first meeting, Andrew and I. But he
wasn’t dead.
I went home three days later without my baby. But my mantra
was “He’s not dead.” I was holding onto the fact that he’d made it through the
first 48 hours so would probably make it through the week. I wasn’t looking
beyond that. I had elected to keep in that hospital instead of transferring
him. The hospital had the facilities and the doctors, if not the paperwork,
yet. The primary doctor had worked on the team responsible for the then world
record smallest baby – 9 ounces. And yes, I confirmed his story. Besides,
Andrew probably wouldn’t have survived the transfer because it would have been
within the first two days.
Andrew came home 108 days later on August 16th.
One day before his actual due date. I had to swear that I felt confident about
taking care of him at home with no monitors.
Today, Andrew turned 14. He will be graduating 8th
grade in less than a month. With all of his difficulties, he is a relatively
happy kid. Very quiet, a little shy, obsessed with Star Wars and Bakugan. He
loves animals and chocolate. He is a little more than 5 feet tall and weighs
almost 100 pounds. Like most mothers of teenagers, I want to kill him
regularly. He knows how to push every one of my buttons. He gives the best hugs. He’s my miracle.
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| Andrew's first picture, taken by the nursing staff. |
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| Andrew's 8th Grade Graduation picture |
