Category: pregnancy

Dear Diary,

Today is the older one’s 18th birthday. The hub and I were talking about how clearly we remember the day she was born–going to the hospital with nary a contraction; waiting for hours before I was prepped for surgery; hearing the  OB admit he thought baby girl would not survive her birth, the C section–after which she cried very weakly and failed her Apgar, the hub’s speedy exit to follow the ambulance carrying baby girl to the Children’s hospital for immediate aid.  That day was paralyzingly scary and ultimately, over the next few days, overwhelmingly joyful. Her survival felt like the biggest win anyone could ever hope for.

The pandemic is a constant teacher about the elasticity of time, as stressful and traumatic events often are. Consistent with that, baby girl’s birth feels like it was a hundred years ago, and like it happened yesterday.

Unlike other days in lockdown, I want to draw this day out, and savor the thrill of being able to celebrate her EIGHTEENTH birthday….a notion so inconceivable the day she was born I would never have dared to think it….

Until tomorrow

Dear Diary,

We’ve been sheltering in place for almost two weeks and although I am a homebody, I’m starting to get that trapped feeling.

I’ve had this feeling before, and been haunted by it long after it resolved.

I was first introduced to this feeling when I was twenty four weeks pregnant with our first child. At an impromptu gynecology appointment my doctor noticed that the fetal heartrate was…a bit lethargic. She sent me home to drink water and rest, and invited me to return to the office for another check after the weekend.

But at that meeting, the heartrate continued to be sluggish. The next day I was squeezed into the schedule of a fetal cardiologist at the Children’s Hospital–a specialist I’d never heard of at a place I didn’t intend to visit for many months. The cardiologist found that the fetal heartrate had slipped further since it had been originally measured. Within a few days it became clear that I had a previously undiagnosed autoimmune condition that was attacking the fetal heart. This condition strikes about 120 pregnancies out of 4 million in the U.S. each year.

We could not induce an early delivery because we would have a preemie with a serious heart condition. If we left her in utero, her heart could fail without warning and she’d die.  There was no tested protocol for this condition. Fetal fatality rates are high.

Each time I intersected with the high risk team, they predicted the baby would die. We watched, helpless, as her heart rate dropped to 50 beats per minute at a time when it should’ve been 140 bpm. The doctors didn’t understand why her heart was beating at all.

We lived in this limbo for three months.

And we lived every minute of every day of those three months. Taking it one-day-at-a-time.  Waking up, and scrambling eggs, and walking in the neighborhood and editing written work, trying to write code. And everyday that I went to sleep with a fetus that I could feel moving I felt grateful. And when I couldn’t feel her move I drank coffee or ate something to induce movement, proof that we still had a beating fetal heart.

When we reached 37 weeks the team decided that a C section should be done to get the fetus access to medical care. And she needed it. She immediately failed her apgar, and after her birth her heart rate slipped further–beating too slowly to metabolize food. As a two day old she was wheeled back into the operating room for open heart surgery to implant a pacemaker for her damaged heart.

She will turn 18 in May.

One.

Day.

At.

A.

Time.