With Mother’s Day just around the corner, I thought it would do to introduce you all a little more to my beautiful babies. I’d like you to get to know them a little, as you’ve gotten to me some. They are my world, my light. They teach me so much about myself and are the largest reason for who I am today.

I begin with my oldest, my Princess.
Her story will be the longest, but that is due to the special circumstances surrounding her profound entrance earth bound.

I don’t blame you if you don’t read the whole thing, but, I promise that if you do, you will believe, even just a little bit, in miracles.

In this day and age, premature babies aren’t as much of an unknown. They are born every day. There are special diapers, clothes you can buy and special formulas for them in the stores. It’s an every day occurrence. It saddens me that this is the case.

Now, take your mind back 16 years ago. This wasn’t the case. Premie survival was a new frontier. The drugs for their very survival were experimental. The retail market hadn’t caught on yet because it wasn’t an epidemic yet. A mother of a premie baby was left scared and unsure, and without the proper tools.

It was 1992 and I was 41/2 months pregnant with my first child. I was 19 years old. I was scared shitless at becoming a mother, because this was not my plan. Yet, I was full of excitement and fairy tale dreams about my baby girl. Hair bows and frilly dresses. Pretty pink diaper covers, you know, the ones with the ruffles all over the butt. It was a time for dreams and preparations.

I was working full time in a medical office. I was working the back office, filing and what not, because of my condition I couldn’t have any direct contact with patients and my mobility would soon be limited. My husband was in between jobs and taking the down time to recuperate and figure out what he wanted to do.

One night I was home preparing dinner. Shake-n-bake pork chops and macaroni and cheese. His favorite. I hated it. I had just pulled out the chops when it happened.
I started bleeding.
Now, without going into gory details, I will say that I didn’t think a human could dump out that much blood and still survive, but I obviously did. Not easily though, and not without a fight.
My husband wrapped me in towels and sheets and rushed me to the nearest hospital. From there the airvaced me to the nearest neonatal specialists in the nation at St. Joseph’s in Phoenix.
They ran test after test. They did blood tests. They ran ultrasounds. They looked and double looked and there wasn’t any reason for the detattchement. My placenta was pulling away from the uterus.
In pregnancy, there are three possible medical explanations for this occurrence.

One of which has to do with the placenta atattching it’s self wrong to the uterine lining. This wasn’t the case for me. My placenta had attatched just as nature intended it to have.
One reason for detatchment was if I had been hit, and hard. Car accident strength blow to the abdomen. I hadn’t suffered any car accident like blows, or any blows to the abdomen for that matter either. Nothing.
The other reason is if I were a hard core drug user. Like, coke, heroin, crack. Stuff like that. I’ve never touched the stuff in my life and after probably ten different drug tests, they finally believed me. That wasn’t the problem either.

So, we were left with no medical explanation for why my placenta was detaching. It just was. The game plan now was to at least get the bleeding stopped long enough to carry this baby to term. At this point I was only 4 1/2 months along, remember. The doctors needed me and the baby to hold out to hit 28 1/2 weeks before they would even think about trying to save her.

I spent some time in the hospital. I was not allowed to so much as roll over in my bed, let alone do anything else, including go the bathroom in the actual bathroom. It took about a week, and we got the bleeding stopped. The doctors sent me home with special instructions that I was to stay down, completely bedridden, and take this medication to keep the contractions at bay.
24 hours later I was back in the hospital bleeding heavily again.

Round two.

It took them about another week to get the bleeding to slow. It never did really stop this time. I was kept on high alert. That meant, I was not allowed to eat and I had I.V.’s keeping me nourished and hydrated. I was held on the labor and delivery floor the whole time in my own room. I was still loosing blood, but the baby seemed to be doing ok, even still. They kept me pretty drugged up to keep the contractions away, so my body couldn’t try to push the baby out. The surgeons and neo-natal specialists were kept on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I was there for approximately 2 weeks. That was the longest the Dr.’s had every been placed on call.
The goal was to get me past the safety point they’d pre-established. I had to carry the baby through to 51/2 months in order for there to even be the slightest chance of survival on the baby’s part.

One night, after a round of visits from various friends and my husband, I was having some pretty bad pains in my lower back. I had just hit the 28 1/2 week mark when these pains had begun. It was almost as if the baby knew.

Visiting hours were over, and every one left. At that point, the nurse came in to check on me. I told her of the pains and that my thought was constipation. She took my temperature and it was very high. She left the room to get me a Tylenol suppository to see if we could bring the fever down. (I wasn’t allowed to have anything by mouth.) When she came back into my room, she was sheet white. There were 2 Dr.s with her and about 8 residents. Apparently, as it turned out, the high fever was from an infection and the back pain was not constipation, it was contractions. I was in labor despite the medications and the precautions. My little girl was going to be born right now whether we liked it or not. She immediately began showing signs of distress, her heart rate dropped dramatically, she was going to die.

They put the call into my husband, whom had just walked through the door at our home, which was about 45 minutes away from the hospital, and told him he needed to get here as fast as he could because they were taking me in for an emergency cesarean in order to save both of our lives.
He was there in less than ten minutes.

When he arrived, they were prepping me for surgery. I was signing paper work. One said that if the baby didn’t look “good” they would not try to save her. It was just too early. The other stated that if the scar tissue in my uterus was too bad, they would have to do a total hysterectomy, rendering me unable to ever have another baby again. I cried the whole time, and prayed like I’ve never prayed before.
Finally, they were ready to enter.

She was so tiny, they had a hard time getting her out. They could not get away with the safest cut to my uterus, which would have been a horizontal incision. Instead they had to cut vertically in order to be able to get a hold of her. This, if I were ever to have more children, meant that I would only be able to deliver through a c-section for the rest of my life. I didn’t care as long as my baby survived. Just make the cut.

I was able to watch in a mirror located above my head on the ceiling. I saw them pull out the tiny bundle with a head of deep black hair. She cried! She made a sound! They decided right then that her color was good, she cried, they were going to try and save her life. Off to the side they had an entire team of specialists waiting to rush her off. They went into motion at the Dr’s word and took my baby away. They pumped her full of a then experimental drug, a steroid, to get her lungs working even though she wasn’t nearly old enough to survive at this point. That was the last form I had to sign. Consent to administer the experimental steroid drug.
I was there alone, with my husband, and the Drs. I was terrified.

My baby peanut was born at 11:29pm on October 6th, 1992. She was due on January 17th, 1993.

About four hours later, I had finally come out of the recovery room and had been wheeled into my own hospital room. I was groggy and sore, but alert enough to be scared. After laying there for what seemed hours, a kind nurse finally came in with news about my baby girl. She was fighting. She was doing ok, and still alive. She brought me a polaroid, since I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere yet, I was still very sick from the infection and I couldn’t see my baby just yet.
The picture shocked me. It terrified me even more than I had already been. It wasn’t my baby. Couldn’t be my baby. It was a frog. She was so tiny. She looked like a baby frog in a mad scientists lab. She had wires and tubes and.....oh my baby!

The nurse told me her vitals were stable right now. She weighed in at 1 pound 8 ounces. She was just as long as a #2 pencil, unsharpened. I cried.

The following day I was allowed to go and see her. They wheeled my whole bed into the NICU, into this little glass POD where my baby lay in an incubator. She was the sickest baby in the place.

That began a long and tumultuous road. I wasn’t well enough to leave the hospital for another two weeks. In that time, I found out that I too, was close to death. So close they thought they would possibly loose me on the operating table, then once that was over, they were afraid they were going to loose me still due to the fact that my body had bled out so much, and been through so much trauma, the healing phase was going to be hard on me. Adding to the stress, I had developed a nasty infection within my uterus. The doctors explained it was due to the continuous flow of blood. I healed. I went home. Childless. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. To go to the hospital to have a baby, and leave the hospital without my baby. I understood, though.

Peanut was there for four months. I was there every single day. When my husband would get off work, we’d go down and spend a couple of hours with her. I drove the nurses nuts because I wanted to do as much as possible for my baby, myself. We weren’t allowed to actually hold her until Thanksgiving day. She was so tiny. My husbands wedding band would fit all the way up her thigh. I remember putting it on her.

I made tapes during the long days at home waiting for him to get off work. I taped myself reading her stories, singing lullabies, and talking to her. She loved the sound of my voice. I called the nurses every hour to check on her.
I had to buy 100% cotton baby clothes, and boil them to fit her. Her first Christmas dress was a Cabbage Patch Doll dress my mother bought for her from a toy store’s doll department.
One of her nurses had put her in an outfit that her teddy bear was wearing after her first bath. Diapers didn’t fit her. The newborn diapers were too big, so she was forced to simply lay with the diaper underneath her body. When she went to the bathroom, she’d get pissed off and squirm until all of her alarms were going off and someone would come and change her pants.

Each day was trying. One day we’d get reports that she was doing wonderfully. The next day we were advised to get straight down because she was failing fast.
She was hooked up to a breathing machine. She was intubated with a feeding tube. She had IV’s and wires coming off of every limb and every orifice. They told me she would be deaf, she would be blind, and there would be mild to severe retardation. It was too soon to tell the extremes.

She had heart surgery to close her PDA valve. This valve stays closed inutero so that their lungs don’t take in oxygen, for obvious reasons, but when they are born it opens so that the oxygen can make it to their heart. Hers would open, then it would shut again, causing heart problems. They opened her up and sewed it open. It was a five hour surgery.

She had surgery on her eyes. They desperately were trying to reverse the effects of the continuous oxygen. Too much pure oxygen causes Retinopathy. The retina begins to detatch due to the over growth of blood vessels caused by the pure oxygen for a long amount of time. She was no where near ready to be off of the oxygen, and the only option we had to try and save her vision was the surgery. This was a 12 hour surgery, basically trying to get her body to reabsorb the excess blood vessels and repair the damage already caused by the detatching of the retina.
The surgeon told us that this was the most successful surgery he’d ever performed and he had really high expectations of a full recovery and minimal loss of sight. Only time would tell for sure, however.

She was checked regularly for brain bleeds. These bleeds would lead to cerebral palsy, and other various retardations should they occur, and also based on the extremity of the bleeds. She never had a single bleed. Quite uncommon for any premie baby to not every have any bleeds. Usually they would be slight if the babies were lucky. She had none, ever.

At one point they told me she was deaf. Another reproccussion of the oxygen. She was not. She could hear everything, and this I knew, so did the nurses. They had to post signs outside of her POD warning everyone to be quiet because little Hailey didn’t like noise. She would set off all of her alarms if it got too noisy in her POD. She was NOT deaf.
However, it wasn’t until she was 1 year old that they found out why she failed all of her BAER hearing tests. Her little head and her little ears were too small for the head sets they had to use, so they would just lay them on her ears. They had been squishing her tubes inside her ears that whole time, closing them off so she couldn’t hear the tests, but she heard everything when those things weren’t on her head. She forced them to develop a new way to test premies for hearing.

Once she finally came home on January 20th, 1993, she was on oxygen for another year. We carted around big ol’ oxygen tanks when we had to go the one of the three doctors we were seeing once a week. We saw the pediatrician twice a week. We saw the pulmonologist once a week. We saw the neurologist once a week. And we were to be downtown at the children’s follow up center at St. Joe’s twice a week.

Even though that first year with her home is mostly a blurr, I do remember the specifics of caring for such a needy and sick child.
I had to make her formula out of special ingredients. I couldn’t make it ahead of time either because of the volatile state of the ingredients I had to add. She only ate 3 ounces at a time, every half an hour, and I had to make it fresh every time.
She required medication to keep her kidneys working properly. This she had to have every half an hour as well. I had to chart when she got her meds, how much she peed after, and how much formula she was intaking and how often onto charts they sent home. She was on an apnea monitor, that she hated mind you, and she would rip the electrodes off causing these ear piercing alarms to sound every five minutes. I had to monitor her breathing, to make sure that she was breathing ok, her color was good, and there was no “pulling” at the base of her lungs, indicating congestive heart failure.

Her prematurity caused her to have another condition, called BPD, a lung disease. This was a major concern, since we were looking at getting her off of the oxygen as soon as possible.
She showed great signs in her healing, causing the pulmonologist to reduce the amount of pure oxygen she was getting on a weekly basis. She was finally pulled off of the oxygen on September 22nd 1993.

This is going to be my 15th Mother’s Day with this angel on earth.

She wears glasses for reading, although each year her vision has corrected its self a little more.
She had tubes put in her ears due to chronic ear infections through childhood.
She’s had her adenoids removed.
She’s had two surgeries for hernias, those occured around the age of two.

She can hear.
She can see.
She plays violin.
She plays guitar.
She doesn’t read music.
She hears it, she knows it.

She’s brilliant.
She is smarter than most of the kids in her classes.
She’s kind.
She’s caring.
She’s an angel.

Her lungs are clear and the scar tissue is slowly being absorbed by her body and being replaced with normal lung tissues.
She’s a little smaller than most kids her age, but to look at her you would never be able to tell that she was premature.

She is living proof that miracles do exist. She is one.