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Im Memory of C.M. - submitted by K.M.
At 23 weeks, I was admitted to hospital for leaking fluid on Sunday morning 4th July 2004 because I wasn't sure if it was urine or amniotic fluid. I kept getting gushes of fluid. They were going to take a swab and send me home if it was just my bladder but when they went to do the swab there was blood there instead. Cramps and contractions followed soon after.
The hardest thing was labour because I could still feel her kicking and she was so alive and I knew to push her out would be to end her life (we didn't know the sex at this stage). I held her in for hours apologising to her for not being able to stop this from happening and I was so cranky with my body for betraying me and even though they'd given me 3 lots of meds to stop the contractions, it didn't work.
I knew I was 23 weeks 6 days but they had me as 23 weeks 2 days and Hospital policy - they only attempt to save really premmie babies from 24 weeks on. I begged and pleaded with them to save her but they said they could do nothing. I even said to them I'd pay any amount of money for them to send whoever they needed but they said money couldn't even buy the technology needed to save her. Her eyes were still fused and I knew deep in my heart that she would most likely be blind and have so many complications had she lived anyway, but still to have it happen so sudden and without warning was so hard.
Tragically difficult to go through labour knowing that pushing her out would end her life. I held her in refusing to push until the pain was just so bad I couldn't handle it anymore and I could feel her. She was out in one push and still in her whole sack.I lost over a litre of blood and so they whisked me off to theatre after only having spent a few minutes with my precious daughter, I left her in the hands of my husband.
By the time I got back, she had passed. My husband was able to stay with me over night in hospital where we took turns holding our precious girl while we tried desperately to sleep.
Monday night we came home and the hardest part was physically leaving her there. We put her into the arms of the midwife who had been with me the whole time and words can't describe how it felt to leave her there. I wanted to be home with our son, but I wanted to be home with my little girl too.
Before we came home, her big brother got to kiss his little sister numerous times and touch her nose (his favourite past time) and say bye bye baba. He knows there's something wrong but isn't quite sure what. He just knows mummy and daddy have been away a lot (organising things) and crying a lot and things have been out of whack.We had a private viewing before the funeral service, prior to her being buried. We wanted to be able to go back and sit with her.
In Memory of Molly - submitted by Jessica Cantin
Four months ago the last place I thought I would be today is sitting in a classroom. I have not attended school since early 2006, which is when I dropped out of my freshman year of college. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I “grew up,” so I figured wasting tens of thousands of dollars on a degree from Mass College of Art would be a waste.
My boyfriend, now fiancé, Matt, and I found out I was pregnant with our son, Ezra, a few months later. He was born in October of 2006 and since then our lives have become chaos between both of us working full time and raising him.
In early 2009 we decided to expand our family and have another baby. After one month of trying I became pregnant, a few months later we found out that it was a girl! We were so excited, we wanted a girl so badly. We were counting down the days until we could meet her which was to be around February 7, 2010. That day came sooner than anyone had anticipated.
On October 30, 2009 as I was getting ready for my monthly check-up and I noticed a drip on my leg. I looked down and there was a puddle on the floor. My heart started beating a mile a minute, I thought my water had broken. I was only 25 weeks pregnant and I wasn’t due for over three more months. I thought I was going to lose the baby. I had Matt drive me to the doctor’s office, still an hour before my appointment, and was crying as I asked the receptionist if I could see the doctor early. When the doctor came into the exam room she confirmed that my water had broken. She informed me that there was an ambulance on its way to the office and that I would be taken to Beverly Hospital.
Ezra was crying and screaming for me as he watched his mother being loaded onto a stretcher and taken away from him. Matt followed me to the hospital, where his mother met up with him to take Ezra so he could stay with me. My mother left work and met us at the hospital.
Doctors and nurses crowded around, sticking me with needles for blood work and inserting an IV line. I am the most needle-phobic person I know, so this was not a fun thing to add to the anxiety I was already dealing with. I was informed that another ambulance was on its way to the hospital to move me to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston because Beverly Hospital isn’t capable of handling a situation like mine.
It took about ten minutes to get to Boston, and about a minute later I was in labour and delivery on the tenth floor. Once there, I was stuck with about twenty needles for even more blood work and tests. Then I started bleeding. The doctors were scared because that could be a sign that I had an abruption, which is when the placenta tears away from the wall of the uterus. If that were the case, the baby would be in danger-- there would be no way for her to get oxygen from me, which meant I could need an emergency c-section at any minute. Or, I could lose too much blood and need a blood transfusion. So they insisted on inserting a second IV-- just in case.
I had a sonogram done, and they measured the baby and said she would weigh approximately one pound and fourteen ounces if I had her that day. They hooked me up to a monitor that constantly watched her heart rate. One of my IV lines was hooked up to magnesium, which calms the uterus and stops contractions in order to prevent labour, it also makes you feel horribly groggy and sick. The other was hooked up to three different kinds of antibiotics to prevent an infection from forming. They gave me an injection of hormones to make her lungs develop faster, and a shot of Rhogam because I have a negative blood type. I was stuck using a bedpan which was a new and horrible experience. A nurse from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) came up to talk to me about what it would be like taking care of a baby this young. They told me that she would have a sixty percent survival rate. I was informed that they were going to try to keep me pregnant as long as possible, and that some women going through this even make it to 34 weeks. But 34 weeks is rare, and every day she has in utero to further develop is a huge milestone. The big thing is preventing infection. With the membranes being ruptured bacteria could get up to where the baby is.
After a long night my bleeding and contractions slowed down enough that they decided to move me down to the sixth floor. The sixth floor is for high-risk pregnant women on hospital bed rest. It’s a much more comfortable place to just sit and wait as opposed to labour and delivery which was constantly buzzing with people. It was the beginning of the long, stressful wait. The goal was to reach at least twenty-eight weeks gestation, at twenty-eight weeks the survival rate for premature babies goes up to ninety percent.
My parents brought Ezra in so I could see him. It was his third birthday and we had to cancel his party. Then about twenty people came to visit me. We discussed what was going to happen with Ezra while I was hospitalized and unable to take care of him. Between my parents and Matt’s parents they would watch him while Matt worked. I felt so helpless; when everybody left all I could do was sit there and wait for something to happen.
For the next few days everything went well, by that I mean nothing happened. I even got bathroom privileges back! (I was allowed to get out of bed just to go to the bathroom). Around day three I started bleeding again. I was rushed back up to labour and delivery and put back on constant monitoring. After about twenty-eight hours of being monitored, stuck back on the bedpan and not allowed to eat the doctor on duty decided that the bleeding had slowed and that the baby’s heart rate looked good so they could send me back downstairs.
Every couple of days it would happen again. I would get sent back upstairs, the doctors and nurses would be sure that I would need a caesarean section any minute, but the baby would remain stable and I was sent back downstairs again. The doctors would make jokes about how I had broken the record for having taken the most elevator rides. One doctor told me that she hoped I would go into labour on my own. That way my body would be making the decision instead of her having to decide whether to deliver the baby or to wait until she showed signs of distress and not have enough time to deliver her. It’s a fine line to walk with a baby that young and being the one to have to make that decision must be very straining.
Every day someone would come in and draw blood about five times and every couple of days I had to get my IVs changed. It seemed like every time they thought I would be fine only having one IV I would have another bleeding episode and they would put the second back in. For someone who hates needles so much I was turned into quite the human pincushion. I kept telling myself that it would be worth it in the end when I had a healthy baby.
I spent a lot of time alone because my family was busy working and taking care of my son for me. During this time the only social interaction I had was with my nurses, and they were all very accommodating. They talked me through the mess of emotions that were going through my head. It was so hard for me to just lay there while everyone else took care of my responsibilities for me. I felt so useless. My nurses helped me get through that by helping me realize that I was making huge sacrifices for my daughter, and that she needed me more than my son did at that time. I felt better about everything with their help.
On November fourteenth, fifteen days after being admitted into the hospital and one day shy of the twenty-eight week goal, I woke up feeling a bit crampy. When my nurse came in to do my morning monitoring and we noticed that I was having contractions every five minutes. They were getting stronger and within an hour I couldn’t even talk through them. I called my mother and Matt and told them to come to the hospital.
The labour went so fast that I couldn’t have gotten an epidural had I wanted to. My mother got to the hospital first, and Matt had just enough time to get there before it was time to push. The nurse called the NICU team and within a minute there were at least twenty new people in the room.
She came out in two easy pushes. Molly Elizabeth was born at 3:17PM on November 14, 2009 weighing two pounds, nine ounces. I was laying in the delivery bed trying to see her, but Matt was standing in my way so I asked him to move. Everybody in the room said that when I spoke she turned her head and opened her eyes looking for me. She had to be intubated because she did not start breathing on her own right away. They told me that this was normal for a baby this young, then showed her to me before bringing her up to the NICU.
After taking some time to recuperate I went up to the NICU to see her. She was so tiny and beautiful! After taking some time to eat and rest Matt brought me back up to see her. I held her tiny hand and watched her sleep. Her nurse told us that she was breathing mostly on her own and that if she kept doing so well they would take her breathing tube out by the morning. She also answered whatever questions I could think of at the time. I started getting sore after a while so we went back down to my room.
The next morning when we went back up to see her she was off of the ventilator and on CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) instead. It was a good thing because it meant she was breathing on her own, the CPAP just provides a constant flow of air to prevent her lungs from collapsing in case she forgets to keep breathing. It was huge on her and we could hardly see her face behind it, but it meant she was progressing. The next day I was to be discharged, finally free after spending so long in the hospital! Just being allowed to get up and walk was weird, my legs were weak and wobbly. It turns out that there was still some placenta left in my uterus and instead of being discharged I had to go into surgery to have it removed. They kept me in the hospital for two more days after the surgery. Finally I was released after being there for three weeks. I went to my parents house to surprise Ezra, who had started saying “Mommy’s broken. Stuck in the hotsibal”. When he realized I was back he couldn’t stop smiling and hugging me.
Over the next week and a half I divided my time between Ezra and visiting Molly in the hospital. I could just stare at her and hold her little hand for hours. Every day when I went to visit she was progressing more. I went in a few days after I was discharged and I had to make sure I was at the right incubator bed the CPAP was off; she wasn’t getting any help breathing! Her nurse told me that she was doing so well for her age, they couldn’t believe it. She was progressing really well with her feedings, and as soon as she was up to full feeds they could to transfer her to Beverly, which they told me could be in the next week or so. She told me that Molly was acting a lot older than other babies her age usually act. They also told me that I could start holding her during feeding time. She was so small sitting on my chest. She relaxed and fell right asleep. It felt so nice to finally be able to hold her.
Matt and I went to visit her one night. I was so excited that he was finally going to get to hold her for the first time. When we got there Molly’s nurse told us that she just started to become a little cranky and that maybe he shouldn’t hold her until she felt better. She was pulling her legs up to her stomach and wincing like she had a stomach ache. Her nurse went to change her diaper and found that there was some blood in her stool. She explained that this could be a sign of something called necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), which happens when intestinal tissue dies. She told us that it is common in premature babies, but it is also serious. The x-ray team came up and did some x-rays. They told us that her bowel was still intact which meant she wouldn’t need surgery, but that they would keep doing x-rays to watch it.
She started vomiting, and her temperature ad oxygen levels were dropping. They had to intubate again because she was in pain and having a hard time breathing on her own. Her iron levels also dropped and they had to give her a blood transfusion. There were about ten doctors and nurses crowded around along with two surgeons from Children’s Hospital, inserting IV’s, doing tests and keeping a close eye on her progress. She wasn’t taking well to the ventilator so one nurse had to stand there with a hand pump bag and manually breathe for her. This all happened over a period of about two hours.
About an hour later the x-ray showed that her bowel had perforated and that she would need to go across the street to Children’s Hospital for surgery. We walked over and sat in the surgery waiting room and waited for a couple of hours. It was a long, torturous wait. My mom and Matt’s parents had come into Boston to wait with us. Finally one of the surgeons came in to talk to us and told us that Molly had handled the surgery well, especially for her young age. He explained what they had done, which included placing a colostomy bag to give her bowels a chance to rest and heal. He told us that we could go in and see her in a little bit, they were just trying to stabilize her.
We were moved to a family waiting room over by the NICU. After another hour or so in that room a nurse came in and told us that it would be a little longer, they were having a hard time keeping her stabilized. Finally she came back and said that we could go see her, but she was still not completely stabilized. It was so hard to look at her. They were giving her a lot of fluids so she looked swollen, she was receiving more blood, had IV’s in each arm and leg, and was on what they call a hi-fi ventilator, which causes her to lay there motionless while the ventilator basically makes her entire body vibrate. We were told that it is supposed to help bring her oxygen levels up by creating a panting effect.
The nurses told us to go get some rest. They explained where to go to get a room in the parent sleeping area and our families went home. Trying to get sleep was extremely difficult with everything that was happening, I just wanted to be with her and know that she was going to be alright.
Around 4:30AM, just as I was finally falling asleep, my phone rang. Matt answered it because I was still half asleep. I kept trying to ask him what was going on and I couldn’t figure out what the conversation was about because he was just saying “mhmm... okay... yes... okay...” Finally when he got off the phone he told me that we had to go back to the NICU. “That was one of her nurses. They still can’t stabilize her and they don’t think she’s going to make it.” I just broke down and kept telling myself that she would be alright, a miracle would come our way and fix everything. We called our parents and told them to come back.
I became robotic and just agreed to everything we were told, not actually believing it to be true. I asked to have a minister come baptize her. I asked that if they knew for a fact that she was going to go could I hold her when the time came. They told me that in order to hold her they would have to take her off of the hi-fi ventilator and put her on the regular one, which would probably cause her to die faster. I told them that I’d rather have five minutes holding her than twenty minutes watching her die alone on a bed.
Once our families arrived at the hospital again Molly was baptized. Shortly after they switched her over to the regular ventilator so we could hold her. I let Matt hold her first because he never got to. The first time he was able to hold his daughter was as she was dying in his arms. After a few minutes we switched and I held her. She was laying on my chest. It seemed like she was staying alive a lot longer than they had told us she would. I kept looking at the machines; her heart rate had dropped to a normal level and her oxygen levels raised to where they should be and she just stayed there.
We fell asleep together for a few hours. When I woke up everyone was still sitting around and she was still stable. I suddenly became hopeful again that she would be just fine. I felt bad for having hogged her after thinking she was dying any minute now, so I let Matt hold her again. As soon as she was removed from my chest her heart rate and oxygen levels started dropping again and the nurse came over and told us that we only had a few minutes left. After Matt held her for a minute or so he gave her back to me and this time her heart rate and oxygen continued to decline. The nurse said that the machine wasn’t detecting a heartbeat, so she listened with the stethoscope and said that there was none. They removed the breathing tube while she was still in my arms and told me not to be alarmed. When people die they take a few last gasping breaths; she did just as they said she would. And that’s how my daughter died in my arms on November 26th, Thanksgiving Day, 2009.
Sitting there crying over her for the next couple of hours I still didn’t believe that it really happened. Part of me knew what had just happened, but most of me just didn’t believe it. A little while later her nurses cleaned her up, removed her IV lines, dressed her and wrapped her up in a blanket. I held her again and we passed her around so our parents could hold her and cry as well. We signed papers that were brought to us and they gave us packets of information for infant loss support groups and the like. Her nurses kept asking if there was anything that they could do for us, but there was nothing. One of her nurses from Beth Israel came over to hug and cry with me.
Finally I just couldn’t be there anymore and we went home. My parents let Matt and I come home and try to sleep for a bit while Ezra was at their house where my sister had been watching him. Later we went to their house for the worst Thanksgiving dinner ever. The food was good, but having a family sit around the table crying isn’t the most enjoyable thing ever.
A few days later Molly’s funeral was held. So many people showed up, it was unreal. At this point I was still numb to the whole thing, it hadn’t hit me that it had actually happened. The only time I even broke down and started crying was when two of Molly’s nurses came through the line. I couldn’t believe that they had come all this way to show us their support. The employees of the funeral home said they counted about one hundred and fifty people. Our house was filled with cards and flowers. I couldn’t believe that so many people wanted to show their support for a baby they had never met.
It took about a month for everything to hit me and for me to realize that it had actually happened. I would be doing fine until some miniscule thing would remind me of her and set me off. Today, as I sit here and write this (February 7, 2010), was my due date in my pregnancy. Right around now is also the time when she should have been released from the hospital and coming home. Writing about this experience is still very fresh and difficult for me.
While I was in the hospital I started thinking that maybe I would like to be a nurse. The way that my nurses were there for me made me think that I would like to be that person to other people. After Molly died I decided that I definitely did want to become a nurse. I began looking into school options. I figured I would apply and start school in the fall until I got a course book for North Shore in the mail and realized that it wasn’t too late to sign up for classes for the winter/spring 2010 semester. So here I am, sitting in a classroom, knowing what my career goals are, when just four months ago it was the last place I thought I would be. Life works in mysterious ways; sometimes you have to take something horrible and make good things come of it.
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