Abrupt delivery

By Heidi Prescott Wieneke

The doctor lifted a dry erase marker to the board and started drawing a graph with lines and numbers. The longer we waited to deliver, he explained, tracing each line downward, the lower the baby’s chance of survival.

Silence filled the room.

After two normal trimesters in my second pregnancy, my husband, Bob, and I did not expect the series of complications the doctors had been monitoring to lead us here. Not at 29 weeks.

I endured a month’s worth of appointments, tests, even a couple of brief hospital stays and orders for bed rest.

But an ultrasound on this blustery March morning indicated a possible placental abruption, where the placenta detaches from the uterus before the baby is born. It can be dangerous to the baby and mother.

Now we faced the most important decision of our lives. Of our baby’s life.

“It’s your choice,” the high-risk doctor said as we sat stunned and scared. I lifted my water bottle only to have it snatched by my OB/GYN across the table.“Not if you’re delivering,” he said, confirming the decision we made a minute later.

We were having a baby.

I journaled the unexpected turn of events to our baby that evening.

“The past two weeks have been a blur for your daddy and me. Everything has happened so fast. And it was not until this morning that we realized just how soon we would see you face-to-face.”

They whisked me into the operating room that same morning, and Evan was born at 12:45 p.m.

“You were lucky,” the doctor told us during surgery.

Until then, I had remained quite calm, focusing on each doctor, each test, each decision. But when the nurse wheeled me into the Newborn Intensive Care Unit, I broke down and cried at the traumatic turn of events.

The nurse scooted me up to an isolette, a fancy name for an incubator, and placed the littlest baby I had ever seen, in my arms. He weighed just 3 pounds.

Like any other baby, they swaddled Evan, who had a head full of blond hair, in a blanket. But unlike many babies, tubes and wires connected him to monitors and machines. At almost 11 weeks premature, his skin looked transparent. His hand wasn’t much bigger than Bob’s wedding band.

In the days ahead, we started to understand the sights and sounds surrounding our newborn. Having a preemie makes you feel helpless in many ways, but we strengthened our bond with Evan by talking to him and holding him as much as we could.

When the time arrived for me to go home, the back seat looked empty and my heart ached to be going anywhere without Evan in my arms.

“I’m ready to leave the hospital after what seems like a very long time. I’m sad that we’re unable to bring you with us. You’ll be here six to eight weeks so the doctors make sure you’re doing everything for yourself.”

Evan usually slept much of the day when I stayed by his side in the unit, and he’d wake up when Bob arrived at the hospital after dark.

His 3-year-old brother, Ryan, visited him first.“Hi Evan, I’m your big brother,” Ryan said softly as he peeked through the circular window of the isolette.

Every now and then an alarm sounded when his heart rate dipped, or his breathing would get shallow enough for a nurse to check him. Sometimes a connection would come loose from a hand or foot when he moved.

It is so hard not to worry all the time with a preemie. You worry about feedings. About fussiness. About germs someone might pass along. You worry about what tomorrow will bring.

We cherished every little milestone, like the day Evan moved from an isolette to a regular crib, and the day his feeding tube came out.

“Until now I’ve held you, taken your temperature and changed your diapers. But today they let me feed you and it was so awesome. This made me really feel like a bigger part of your life.”

We took Evan home four weeks to the day after he entered the world.

The hospital armed us with a heart monitor, oxygen tanks and a calendar filled with appointments. It didn’t take long before we became nimble carrying Evan, a diaper bag and portable oxygen tank everywhere we traveled.

“Your daddy and I are exhausted and that is probably an understatement. The past few months have proven so rewarding and at the same time so challenging.”

Four years have passed and our preemie no longer looks anything like a preemie. The doctors took Evan off the monitors and oxygen about four months after he was born, and he has never looked back.

But we do.

In terms of milestones, Evan completely ‘caught up’ with other children his age somewhere between 2 and 3. He is still our little night owl, and he is as strong-willed as they come. He loves to color and enjoys reading stories.

Evan often asks me to tell him the story about when he was born. I tell him he wanted out of Mommy’s tummy really bad, and one day he said, “Enough is enough,” and that’s when he abrupted.

We always ask him why he did that.

He responds through a smile, “I didn’t have patience.”