Your miracle's birth story

[MissDipper]

Help us celebrate the group by sharing about the miracles that bring us together. We all have AMAZING stories to share about our preemies. What is your miracle's birth story? 

[AmyParent]

Hi my name is Amy Parent. Mom to a beautiful baby girl born at 33 weeks.I would love to share my preemie journey with you. I have 2 kids, a 4.5 year old boy and 15 month old girl. My son was a wonderful text book pregnancy, born at 39 weeks 8 lbs even 9 hours of labor. We were very excited that after 9 months of trying we were expecting again when he was almost 3. The beginning was great and we were ecstatic to learn we were expecting a girl due Feb 9 2009. At my 24 week appt. I told the doc I was having some pain in my hip and he said it was just my ligament streching- no big deal. The next week I was unfortuantely in a rear-end accident on the freeway. I went to L/D for monitoring and found that I was contracting and they kept me overnight. Everything seemed to be okay...meanwhile I was having about once weekly what I called "gastric attacks" where I would get an intense pain in my upper abdomen like a contraction it was very painful. The next few weeks were awful my symptoms were get worse and I was in L/D at least once a week for contractions and /or uncontrolled vomitting. Around thanksgiving I had to stop working and then was hospitalized for a couple days. On the first of Dec, my insurance changed and then was transfered by ambulance to another hospital. The did some tests and ultrasounds to see if they could find anything and were not able to. I was now waking up with fevers in the middle of the night and the pain in my hip started to go away and I started to develop a pain in my groin muscle. To make a really long story shorter I was readmitted to L/D on Dec. 20th with groin pain so bad I could not walk. They brought in the hospital surgeon and decided to do a CT scan. When I came back to my room from the CT scan I started to crash -Fever spike to 102 and Oxygen drop to 60% lost the baby's heartbeat and when they got it back it was 200+. They called to radiology and discovered the pain in my groin was from a growing abcess due to a ruptured apppendix that once they got in there discovered had been ruptured 2-4 weeks. So needless to say my daughter was delivered on Dec. 22nd at 1:49 am by emergency c-section. She was 4 lbs. 17 in long. They started oxygen support using the Bubble CPAP but within 24 hours she had to be intubated for a week. She was born with a fever/infection and spent Christmas under the bili lights. She had severe RDS. By New Years she was back on bubble CPAP and by 3 weeks old was taking a bottle well but still not weaned from CPAP then at 5 wks and still on CPAP they did a broncoscopy and discovered an airway anomoly that they said she would simply have to outgrow, she was needing the oxygen support for pressure not so much the oxygen itself. Not too long after that she was moved to just a nasal canula for a couple weeks and then about 6 days after her due date (Valentine's day)she was oxygen free and got to come home on Feb 17th at 7ibs 13 oz.. The hardest part of this story is all along my health continued to worsen and was in and out of the hospital myself during her NICU stay including an additional surgery on Feb 2nd. I had come home on the 11th of Feb. and all seemed well but exactly one week after she came home I was readmitted to the hospital with another abcess. It was discovered that I had a leak in my intestine caused by the infection and I had to have a temporary ileostomy so that my intestines could heal. I spent one more month in the hospital and only got to see my kids a handful of times. After a long year I finally had the ileostomy reversed 12 days before Bekah's first birthday. She is a happy girl who is developing beautiful and I couldn't be more thankful for anything than my little miracle!