When we got pregnant the first time with Jackson, we bought “What to Expect …” books. You know, “What to Expect When Your Expecting” and “What to Expect the First Year”, both by author Heidi Murkoff. We would set aside a little bit of time each night before bed to read a few pages to get ready for this tiny little human that we were going to be responsible for. Actually, I think it was mostly me reading. Stacy might have skimmed through the books, but I think women just automatically know what to expect. Perhaps it’s because they’ve had friends that have been through a pregnancy, or they babysat when they were in school, or maybe it’s just in their DNA. I was at a disadvantage here. I had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t been around babies much and wanted to be prepared.
Side note: I never understood why people say, “we’re pregnant”, when a couple is expecting a baby. “We” are not pregnant, only the woman is. Last time I checked, men can’t get pregnant, unless they’re Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Junior”. The man fertilizes the woman’s egg and SHE gets pregnant. She goes through all of the hormonal changes, the mood swings, the aches, the pains, the weird cravings. As the man, we don’t go through all of that. We might get random requests to stop on the way home from work to pick her up pickles and ice cream; or comfort her when she starts crying about something she normally wouldn’t cry over. The closest we can get to being pregnant, is the sympathy weight we gain while our wife or girlfriend is pregnant, but “we” are most definitely not pregnant.
After our heartbreaking experience with losing Jackson we quickly realized that sometimes life throws you unexpected curves. (Our tragic loss of Jackson was discussed in the Our Story.) When we…sorry, I mean when Stacy became pregnant with baby #2, we were happy, scared, and nervous all at the same time. By no means were we trying to replace Jackson. He will always be considered our first child, even though we never got the chance to meet or hold him. As a matter of fact, we sometimes refer to him as James’ big brother. We were a little surprised that Stacy got pregnant again so soon after losing Jackson. The sadness, emptiness, numbness, and anger were still so fresh when baby #2 came into the picture. Of course we were happy that we had a second chance to have a child, but we were understandably scared to death. “Would this child be “normal”?” We were a little bit stressed out waiting for all of the prenatal tests and ultrasounds to come back with the “all clear”. After everything we went through during our previous pregnancy, and ultimately losing Jackson, we decided to wait until our new baby appeared to be healthy before we told family and friends. Stacy was about 4 months along before we told anybody. Four months of waiting, nail biting, pacing, wondering, praying.
Needless to say, it was a very long four months. Once we received the final confirmation that this baby seemed healthy and normal, you could hear our sighs of relief. We continued with the routine OBGYN visits and ultrasounds, and everything seemed normal throughout the pregnancy. Then, on the night of August 28th, 2009, everything was about to change.
In the middle of dinner, Stacy’s water broke, and she immediately ran to the bathroom. As she was cleaning up, she noticed what appeared to be meconium in the amniotic fluid. Meconium, a newborn baby’s first poop, is made up of cells, fats, and intestinal secretions, and is usually passed in the first few hours or days after birth. When meconium is passed prior to birth, it can make it harder for the baby to breathe because it can clog the airways, irritate the airways and injure the lung tissue, and block surfactant, which is a fatty substance that helps open the lungs after birth. (The preceding information about meconium was taken from https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/meconium.html.)
We rushed to the hospital as fast as we could, but it still took us about 30 minutes. As we walked through the parking lot towards the ER, Stacy had a towel between her legs to absorb the amniotic fluid. We passed a woman in the parking lot who told us “congratulations”. Apparently, a woman waddling towards the hospital with a towel between her lets is a sign that she is about to have a baby.
Once we got settled into a room in Labor and Delivery, the nurses started the routine pre-delivery prep work. There was some concern that James wasn’t moving. One of the nurses reached up inside of Stacy to try to attach some probes to detect a heartbeat. When she lightly scratched his head and he still didn’t move, she feared that he was in distress and called for an emergency C-section. I can’t explain what we were feeling at that moment. We were in utter disbelief. How did we go from the Jackson pregnancy where we knew something was wrong early on, to this pregnancy where everything seemed normal, only to be thrown this curveball? “Was James okay?” “Please be okay!” “God, please don’t do this!”
When our OBGYN on-call arrived, Stacy was wheeled into delivery to get James out as quickly as possible. At 12:30 am on August 29th, James was brought into the world. I had seen enough movies and hospital shows to know that a baby cries shortly after it is born. But James didn’t cry. As we held our breathes waiting for him to cry, we were told that he was alive, but they weren’t sure what was wrong, so they were going to take him to the NICU for further observation and testing. The NICU, or Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, is similar to an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for adults, but the NICU is for babies. Babies that are born premature, who have had a difficult birth, or who have health problems are sent to the NICU. There they receive around the clock care by a team of nurses, doctors, and specialists. We were fortunate enough that James was born in a hospital with one of the best NICUs in the area. If you want to read more about what a NICU is, please visit this page: https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/nicu-caring.html.
James ended up spending the first 2 months of his life in the NICU. During those long, emotional, and draining two months, he was poked, prodded, scanned, and assessed by several doctors and specialists trying to figure out what was wrong with him. By the time we finally got to take him home on October 29th, 2009, this is what we knew:
- James had an in utero stroke during the 1st trimester of pregnancy.
- He had no suck/swallow reflex so he was unable to take breast milk or formula from a bottle or clear his own secretions from his nose or throat.
- They originally inserted a feeding tube through his nose to his stomach as a way to feed him. He later had a surgery to insert a g-tube directly into his stomach.
- Because he was unable to clear his own secretions, James required frequent suctioning to clear his airways.
- James has Factor V Leiden blood clotting disorder.
- The optic nerve in his left eye never fully developed so he has vision issues.
- He doesn’t blink.
- He has a chromosome disorder called 22q11.2 duplication which means he has an extra copy of a small piece of chromosome 22.
- He had reflux and had Fundoplication surgery while in the NICU to prevent this reflux.
- He has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, which affects all 4 limbs.
- He has scoliosis, which is a sideways curvature of the spine.
- He has a seizure disorder
For further details about our two month stay in the NICU, please read the “Life in the NICU” post.
While the “What to Expect…” books are excellent, they did not prepare us for either one of our pregnancies. I don’t think anything could have prepared us for everything we went through. The one thing that got us through it all was each other. There were times when Stacy would break down and I would be the strong one. There were times when I would break down and Stacy had to be the strong one. And then there were times when we both just broke down, when all we could do was just hold each other. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I think going through all of this has made Stacy and I a stronger, both as couple, and as individuals.