Wow! I've been a mom for 12 years!

Twelve years ago I gave birth to our oldest child.   At 12:36 a.m. we were blessed with the gift of Noah and of life!   

Because of our birth experience, Noah's birthday always brings with it a huge array of emotions.   Noah was born by emergency c-section during which I suffered a very rare complication called an amniotic embolism.   He was born with an apgar score of 1, there was barely any sign of life in his precious little body.   As the Dr. and nurses worked with him I continued to hemorrhage.   It is not known when or how, but at some point during the c-section, a minute amount of amniotic fluid got into my blood stream.   This fluid, that is vital in maintaining life to our babies in utero, wreaks havoc when it finds itself within our blood stream.   It traveled into my lungs and resulted in me going into respiratory arrest (my lungs stopped working.)   Thankfully I had already been intubated, and so they were almost instantaneously able to put me on a ventilator to breath for me.  It then continued into my spleen and caused my body to stop producing clotting factors.   Without clotting factors I continued bleeding for hours.   This experience is referred to as "bleeding out", and basically  means that every ounce of blood in my body emptied onto the hospital floor.   Over the next 7 hours I had almost 30 units of blood products transfused.   T. stayed at the side of the operating table the entire time and said the Drs. and nurses were standing in a pool of blood around my table.   

We later learned that the mortality rate at that time for women who had this rare complication is about 90%.   And later as we were making the decision on whether to have another child, the specialists told us that the statistics for reoccurrance didn't exist.    The few women that do live through this almost always have catastrophic brain or heart damage from the lack of oxygen, and are not in a position to consider having more children.

The fact that both Noah and I survived is an absolute miracle!   They believe the embolism occurred either very shortly before Noah was delivered or right afterwards.  This is a very rare complication that can occur during an amniocentesis procedure, and when it does occur, the baby often dies from suffocation because they can not deliver the child soon enough.   

Of course we don't understand why this happened, but Todd and I are acutely aware that the gift of life that God gave us that night changed our family's path forever.    I can see how by my having a "normal" birth experience, my intention for living a more Christ centered life may not have happened, certainly not with the passion that I have for my Lord now.   There is nothing like almost losing your life or the life of a child to bring into focus the importance of living a purposeful and grateful life!   That's why I'm thankful to God for allowing us to go through it.   I'm so thankful that my eyes and heart have been opened to the blessings God has for me as I desire to know him more intimately.   

And we have an amazing son too!   Noah is a daily dose of God's blessings!

We don't have the usual pictures that are taken after the birth of your child, but here are a few that we do have.

There are no pictures of me in ICU.   I wish someone would have thought to take 1 just so I could have seen what I looked like.   From the descriptions people have shared, I was quite a sight.   I weighed 30 lbs. more when I arrived in ICU then I did before Noah was born(they have some way of weighing you when you are laying in bed attached to all sorts of machines, I'm not sure how though.)   Because of the incredible amounts of fluid that they were pumping into my body to replace all the blood loss I had something called "3rd spacing", which means the fluids were pumped at such a speed and in such large volumes that my entire body filled with fluids.   Someone told me, I don't remember who, that I looked like a cross between the Pillsbury Dough boy and Rocky Balboa after a fight.   Not pretty!   But I wished I could see it just the same.   I was hooked up to a ventilator and several other machines in ICU for a couple days, so I never got to see Noah.   But the nurses were very kind and brought me several polaroids, and continually gave me reports on him.   I wasn't able to speak because of the endotrach tube that was in my throat.   I have very few actual memories of those first few days.   But one of the memories I do have is of 1 of the Drs. who came to visit me in ICU.   I don't know that she was a Dr. that was in charge of my care, I believe she just came to share with me that she and several other staff were  praying for me.

Noah was on a ventilator to assist him in breathing for several days after he was born.

This picture is a precious memory of the first time I got to see Noah.   It's a poor quality polaroid, but still so precious to me.   Almost 48 hours after he was born I was taken off the ventilator.   I was still attached to several other machines, but the fact that I was off the vent did make it possible for them to transport me (and all my machines) up from ICU to NICU where Noah was.   So they wheeled my bed up to the NICU so I could see him.   Unfortunately when they got there they realized that my bed wouldn't fit into the doorway of his ICU room.   Because he was still on the ventilator, he couldn't be moved; but I could just barely reach into the room and touch his foot.   I was overcome with joy!   I still get chills every time I look at that picture remembering the overwhelming emotions I felt being so close but yet so far away from my precious baby boy!

This was taken the day we brought him home from the hospital when he was 2 weeks old.   You may be able to notice in these pictures the ridge across his forehead. This is the result of his skull being misshaped, he had it surgically repaired when he was 4 months old and again just this past summer.

This picture was taken a couple weeks after he got home, when he was a month old.

Noah is having his birthday party this weekend.   I'll post some pictures from his party afterwards.

Nancy

Comments

[Ashlee]

WOW! What a story! I had no idea. How incredibly scary for a husband to have to watch that.

Good thing your baby made it too! He's such a neat kid - the world is better off for such miracles!

[Rhonda]

I'm so glad you shared that story, although I do remember hearing parts of it before. I'm wondering about the misshaped skull...did that have anything to do with the trauma a birth? Or was it just something that happened?
Anyway, I'm thrilled that you comment that if this hadn't happened you may not be as close to the Lord today. It reminds me of the verse: What the enemy meant for harm, God will turn to the good.
What a super, great truth...look at him now! You must be VERY proud (and thankful!)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, N!
Rhonda

[N.]

Yea, Ashley T. definitely suffered the most emotionally through the experience. Nurses later told me that he sat by my side and cried and prayed the entire time. And because it was the middle of the night he didn't feel right about calling anyone. The nurses kept asking him, "is there anyone we should call?" and he didn't think to have either my mom or his mom come. Which he was strongly scolded for the next day by both of them!

1 nurse said to him during the night, "If my x-husband showed half as much compassion for me that you have for your wife, he wouldn't be my X -husband."

Several years after this happened I was re-introduced to 1 of the nurses who was assigned to my care that night. I had no memory of who was there that night, but T. became intimately bonded with a couple of the hospital staff that night. I am so thankful that God brought her back into my life, because we now have a special friendship. First of all she has been able to answer the many unanswered questions about the events of that night. As part of my healing process I found it very important to piece together as much information as I could about the events of that evening, whereas for T.'s healing he wanted to forget as much as he could. So every time I would ask about it, it was I like I opening a wound that was trying to heal for T. This nurse friend was more than happy to tell me all the gore details, and it filled her with a huge amount of joy to get to know our family. She was a homeschooling mom too, and we met again at a homeschooling conference. She told me that her heart filled with joy when she saw me with 2 more children, because she took a bold stand that night in asking the Dr. to reconsider doing a hysterectomy. Before the figured out what was going on with me that night, the OB/GYN that did the c-section was considering removing my uterus as a solution to stopping my uterus from bleeding. My nurse friend asked the Dr. to hold off on doing that because I was young and this was my first baby. She stood as a protector of my uterus and future children. I am so grateful for her, and in hindsight she could have full well saved my life. Because it was the embolism that was causing the bleeding, removing my uterus would have had no effect on the bleeding, and the trauma of more surgery could have well been the difference between me surviving that night and not.

This woman's strong convictions about the blessings of children to a family is quite evident by the fact that she is currently pregnant with their 7th child!

N.

[N.]

Rhonda, it was totally unrelated. They have no idea what caused the premature (and incorrect) closing of the plates of his skull. In the beginning they wondered if it was connected to the genetic syndrome that he inherited from me (the whole 6 fingers and toes thing), but the expert that we have seen at NIH in Washington D.C. tells us that there is no connection between those 2 things either.

We're just a couple of freaks (Jesus Freaks, that is!)

N.

[April]

I just love this story Nancy! I had read some of it when you first posted it, but didn't have a chance to finish it until now! It must be a very wonderful thing to be a walking miracle! Plus all the other ways the Lord has intervened in your health....Clearly the Lord has a story to tell through your life and you have not failed Him in declaring His mercies!