My “Baby” Turns 21 Next Week

He’d hate to hear himself referred to as “my baby,” I’m sure.  After all he is 6 feet tall, in college and working full time.  Now I understand why my parents always said I’d remain their “baby” no matter how old I got.

He’s my first-born son who should not be on this planet to celebrate next week, and he rolls his eyes every year when I tearfully remember his almost fatal birth and the 16 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.  How his dad and I spent our time at the St. Jude Shrine nearby, praying to the saint to pray for his life.  But, with all the top doctors in the hospital room at one time spending hours with us, telling us he probably wouldn’t make it and if he did he would likely be totally mentally and physically disabled – he indeed qualified as one of the “hopeless cases” in which  St. Jude is a specialist.  We had to trust in the doctors and God, and a nearly worldwide campaign of prayer taking place for him (in large part, thanks to my sister).

Fifty Million to One – they told me.  Those were the odds that his birth should have happened as it did. No one had any clue in advance – I was healthy and  had the best prenatal medical care in the world; just two days before his birth all the tests showed we were doing fine, although I was almost two weeks past my due date, and a C-Section was planned if I didn’t go into labor within a day or two.

Labor arrived on time and his dad and I went to the hospital, where we expected our only surprise to be whether it was a boy or a girl.  We anticipated using all we had learned in Lamaze class and giving birth in one of the nicely appointed birthing rooms – with a full medical staff of doctors and nurses, of course.   I was not a believer in taking chances.

What happened instead, was both the greatest experience of my life and the worst two weeks I have ever endured.  Miracle upon miracle, unrecognized at the time, piled up to allow my son not only to live, but to live with absolutely no physical or mental complications despite his having been born dead and recussitated on my belly after a crash caesarian unmatched by any “ER” episode.

From the doctor who “happened” to be on duty down to my own unquestioning compliance when he walked back into my room after receiving the results of the blood tests drawn from the baby’s head inside me, saying “we are going to do an emergency caesarean section,”  everything lined up miraculously to save my son’s life and health – although it did not appear that way to anyone at the time.

8 minutes.  It took exactly 8 minutes  for him to be born after the doctor announced the C-Section.  That included a transfer to a gurney, a race to the operating room,  and a push of anaesthesia that didn’t quite “take” until after he began to cut.  8 minutes.

Then, total silence in the OR.  Nothing is so silent, as a birth without a baby’s cry.  No place is so desolate as that room at that moment.  Suctioning noises, doctors barking orders until finally the loveliest sound I have ever heard – a pathetic whimper of a cry from my newborn son.  They swished him by my face to meet him as they raced him to the NICU.  The pace then slowed in the OR as they put me back together.

My “official” doctor then arrived, not quite grasping the magnitude of the trauma taking place until later, when it was clear to my baby’s dad and me that he feared a lawsuit (not illogical, given that mom was a lawyer).  We did our best to reassure him that would never happen – regardless of the outcome.  This was time for prayer – not litigation.

Official doc told us he’d run the fetal heart monitor strips by the 13 other OB/GYN’s in his office, who unamimously said they would have waited another 30 minutes before drawing the blood which miracle doc had drawn on a hunch to discover that the baby was dying.  He didn’t have another 30 minutes, he hardly had another 30 seconds.  When miracle doc was asked what inspired him to draw the blood so early (outside of normal procedures) he shook his head and said “I don’t know.  The Lord was with me.”

All organ systems were shut down except for the heart, lungs and brain.   Impossible even to receive food, he was given a concotion of chemicals through a “skinny line” which began in his skull and  threaded through his veins and arteries to his heart, where it delivered the sustenance that would keep him alive.

When his organs did not recover after two days, the head docs all hovered about my bed preparing us for the worst.  On the third day, I heard the two most wonderful words I have ever heard spoken.  At 11:30 at night, a nurse came into my room excitedly saying, “he peed.”

We celebrated in the NICU, but it was an arduous 13 more days that included his enduring spinal tap, a blood transfusion from his dad, jaundice and a staph infection, until I heard the magic words – “he can go home today.”

Lest my expectations were later to be shattered, upon hugging “miracle doc” goodbye, telling him all would now be well, he said “I’m sure you and his dad will raise him to the best of his abilities.”  Although discharged from the hospital, it would take a least a year for him to be discharged with a clean bill of health from their outpatient care.  A year of neurologists, audiologists, physical therapists and other evaluations.

He walked at 8 months and started running at 9.  He hasn’t stopped.  I didn’t learn until the 1 year NICU reunion of babies how miraculous he truly was.  The head neonatologist then told me – “he was the sickest baby we have ever had.”

We never quite learned why.  Some infection of the placenta and cord occured where such an infection was impossible.  I heard I had something wrong with my autoimmune system – the nature of which I wouldn’t learn for another 20 years.  Why doesn’t matter.

What matters is all the things that should not have been, yet they are.  Thanks to the miracles worked by God and the intercession of St. Jude.  All the sleepless nights, the school events, the birthday parties, the sports played.  What should not have been was – and still is.

The baby who was not supposed to sit up or walk, became Captain of several of his Ice Hockey teams and won championships.  The baby who was not supposed to possess sufficient mental qualities to lead a normal life is in college.  My miracle, my baby, my son, now a grown man.

There is a song by Bette Midler that I’ll hear somewhere this week – it happens every year.  Twenty-one years ago I changed the last line of that song and dedicated it to “miracle doc.”  I don’t plan it, but I always hear it somewhere this time of year, and I sing:

“Thank you, thank you,
thank God for you, you saved my baby boy.”