Inconceivable (25 page)

“Carolyn? Great news. We have one healthy heartbeat!”

Jennifer gave me more details, but I wasn’t paying attention. Joy and relief had overtaken my heart. Her transfer had resulted in one baby who had a robust heartbeat, and Little Man’s was strong too. What more could a mother ask for?

I left that appointment with a clean bill of health from the doctor and an unburdened heart. Now I had two babies growing. How blessed was I?

SEAN

As the door to the office closed behind us and we entered the hallway, we both were upbeat. I reached for Carolyn’s hand as we went
down the hall and squeezed it as a sign that we were going to get through this. Carolyn walked with conviction, and I saw a positive look on her face for the first time since the beginning of the ordeal. Together, we were willing ourselves to higher ground.

I got back into my car very relieved for this ray of hope for our family and its future. Then I was quickly sucked back into the present. I was thumbing through e-mails that I had previously received and came to the one that was making my heart skip a beat: a follow-up e-mail from George Tanber, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. George had originally contacted us in July when he had learned about our situation and asked if he could write about us. We declined, and now, as all good journalists do, he was making a second request. I knew word of our pregnancy was spreading. Just a few days ago a client of mine, someone who didn’t even live in the area, tearfully told me that she was sorry for what she’d heard was happening to Carolyn and me.

I knew we were lucky that George had been so respectful of our privacy, but realized that the next reporter might not be as gracious. His follow-up request was our wake-up call. We had a choice to make: play defense and react to calls as they came and risk having our story told inaccurately by a third-rate tabloid, or go on offense and tell our story ourselves. We chose offense.

Carolyn and I first consulted with local public relation experts, Mike Hart and Matt Schroder, who told us that it wasn’t a question of whether or not our story would be in the press, but when. They believed that it might even become an international story. I asked them to recommend an attorney who specialized in media relations, and they put us in touch with an attorney in New York, who convinced us that we needed to hire a New York public relations firm. The New York PR firm advised us to get out in front of the story so that no one could try to tell it for us. We took their advice.

Our charge to these advisers was simple. We wanted to speak with no one but the most professional journalists, people who would
have compassion for our situation. The New York firm took over those arrangements for us, and we were very pleased to have that worry off our backs.

That night Carolyn was still awake when I came up to bed.

“Aren’t you excited that we have a child coming?” she asked.

“I am very excited, honey, but there’s still anxiety,” I said. “What if the pregnancy fails? Are we setting ourselves up for a small lift and a big fall?”

For me, it was tough to imagine that there would be something positive happening with another child down the road. Suddenly good news was foreign to us. On the other hand, the one thought that did cross my mind was that with all of the difficulty we had faced that year, I could not imagine anything else going wrong.

I was nearly asleep when Carolyn said, “Sean, I ordered the baby a gift today.”

“What kind of a gift?” I asked.

“I ordered him a cashmere receiving blanket. It’s light blue with a satin edge, and I wrote a message to have embroidered on each side. I must have written those four lines at least a hundred times before I got it just right,” Carolyn continued. “It starts, ‘Little Man, Although our time together was brief.’ I want him to know that, even though he isn’t our genetic son and we won’t get to raise him, the time that we had with him bonded him to us and us to him.

“The next line is ‘Know your life is a gift, your birth a blessing,’” she continued. “He has to know that his life, his existence, was never a burden to us.

“‘And know our love flies to you on angels’ wings,’” she said. I saw there were tears in her eyes. “I want him to know that he will never leave our thoughts, and even though we can’t tell him that he is adored, we will love him in our hearts and send our love to him in our prayers.

“Then it says, ‘God Speed…Sweet Dreams…We’ll love you forever!’” Carolyn concluded. “Most of all, I want him to have the
blessings of God. I want him to close his eyes at the end of every day knowing he is treasured by a mommy and a daddy far, far away while he sweetly drifts off to sleep. He needs to know our love for him will be eternal.”

A good-bye present had been ordered. Clearly the time was starting to draw nearer, and I was very aware that I was not ready.

“I hope it will be his favorite blanket,” she said. “That he’ll take it everywhere. But even if he doesn’t, at least when he looks at it when he’s older he’ll know we loved him. If that blanket could have had eight sides, I would have filled every one of them with messages that I am desperate for him to know, but there was only so much a seamstress could fit in the space allowed.”

“Carolyn, that is a beautiful gift, and the message is perfect,” I said as tears streamed down my face. I hugged her, and we held on to each other as we drifted off to sleep.

C
HAPTER
16

Facing Fear

CAROLYN

W
HEN
L
ITTLE
M
AN
and I got to thirty-five weeks, I was shocked that I had made it that far. My original goal had been thirty-two weeks, so when we got to September, I was chalking up bonus time. If my body helped him escape the tortures of the NICU, it would be a huge achievement for me, something I wasn’t able to do for MK and Ryan. I so much wanted to do that for this child. I started monitoring myself carefully—though “obsessively” might be another word for how I was behaving. Every morning I took my blood pressure before I got out of bed, the first of dozens of readings throughout the day. I wouldn’t let thirty minutes go by without checking on the baby and my pregnancy. I even brought my blood pressure cuff with me in the car.

The good news was that the MRI showed that my placenta was fine, not an accreta. That same scan gave us other disturbing news, though.

“See that image there?” said the midwife who was on staff at my perinatologist’s office, pointing at the screen. “Your baby’s cord is wrapped around his neck four times.”

I panicked when I saw the coils of cord around his neck, like rings. I knew that cord wraps were common, but I also had three
friends who tragically had delivered full-term babies who were stillborn because of cord accidents.

“What can I do?” I asked, frantic. “Is there any way to help him?”

“It is quite common. We probably wouldn’t even know the extent of the cord wraps if it wasn’t for the MRI,” the midwife advised me. “The only thing you can do is keep doing your kick counts. If you notice that his activity level is dropping, call us immediately.”

Kick counts. What a joke. I never understood the point of counting the kicks the baby made inside the womb. By the time the baby stopped moving, wouldn’t he already be gone? What the heck was I supposed to do? Lie still all day and tally his movements? And to make matters worse, Little Man was something of an acrobat. I didn’t know if it was because he couldn’t settle into a head-down position or because he was going to be an Olympic gymnast. His flipping and kicking concerned me once I knew about the cord around his neck. Could all his antics pull the cord so tight that he cut off blood flow?

I decided not to share this very stressful piece of information with the Morells. The midwife was probably right that this was not going to harm him. Despite my friends’ tragic outcomes, most babies seem to have the cord around their neck at some point, so I didn’t feel that I had to worry Paul and Shannon.

This heightened my focus on Little Man, though. Of course, he was very rarely out of my thoughts, but now I made a mental note of his every move. When he flipped, I’d look at my watch. If he kicked, I looked at my watch. I checked my watch on the half-hour, and if I hadn’t felt him, I’d drink cold water. I felt bad sending the icy fluid into his warm and cozy environment, but it always worked. He hated it! As soon as the cold water hit, he’d start kicking.

“Sorry, Little Man. I just need to know you are okay.”

On September 17, I was back at my perinatologist for another appointment. They escorted me back right away for my nonstress
test. The nurse, one I’d never met before, positioned the heart rate monitors on my right lower abdomen.

“You know, we always attach those on my upper left side. My baby is breech and seems to prefer to be over here,” I said, pointing to the place where they usually got a good reading on Little Man.

“Oh, he’s so big now, we can pretty much attach these anywhere.”

She finished attaching the nodes and left me alone. I noticed that Little Man was not moving a lot at the moment. I reached for my purse to pull out my water, but then I realized that I didn’t have my water bottle. The nurse came in and looked at the fetal monitoring strip.

“He’s not cooperating very well. We seem to keep losing his heartbeat.”

“Maybe we can move the nodes to the other side?”

“Let’s give him some more time,” she said as she left the room.

I was growing anxious, even though I knew he was fine. I tried moving the nodes myself, but that didn’t help. The nurse returned and suggested that we stimulate him. I assumed she was going to get me some ice water, as that is what the nurses at Dr. Read’s office did to stimulate him. When the nurse returned, she had a contraption that looked something like a Taser.

“What is that?”

“We use this to stim the babies when they’re not cooperating.”

What? Before I could ask any more questions, she pressed the stun gun thing against my belly, and pushed a button. The sound that screamed out from this little machine was one of the most offensive sounds I had ever heard. Little Man jumped in my womb and then began a series of movements that indicated to me that he had been scared to death and was probably wailing inside of my body.

“What the hell was that?”

“Oh, don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt the baby. Just scares them a bit so we can see the heart rate go up.”

Scare him? Why on earth would you want to scare a little baby when a dunk in cold water would have the same effect? I didn’t like this approach at all, and neither did Little Man. His heart rate definitely went up, and he was thrashing around like a fish caught in a net.

“It worked,” the nurse said happily. “His heart rate is definitely up. Now we just need to see it come down.”

Which proved to be a problem. This nurse had just scared the hell out of this child, and I was beyond angry. As we hit the half-hour mark and his heart rate had not decelerated, we decided to call it quits and just do the ultrasound.

I lay on the table, still shaken by the thought of the baby being Tasered by the nurse, when the ultrasound technician, whom I had never met before, entered the room. She asked me what my amniotic fluid had been measuring with Linda a few days prior.

“Linda said it was twelve. It was really good.”

“Have you been drinking a lot? Have you felt any leakage?”

“I’ve been guzzling ice water, and there hasn’t been any leakage. Why?”

“Just lie still,” she said. “I’m going to get the doctor.”

My anxiety started to spike. By the time she returned with the doctor, I was shaking.

“Let’s take a look,” he said, studying the pockets of amniotic fluid in my uterus.

This can’t be happening. My blood pressure is acceptable. Little Man is moving. I listen to his heartbeat on my monitor twenty times a day. Please, God…no problems now. I’m not ready. I’m not ready.

“Carolyn, it appears your amniotic fluid has dropped from a twelve to a seven in only three days. Seven is on the low side of the normal range. This, combined with the fact that we had a difficult time tracing your baby during the nonstress test, is cause for concern,” the doctor said. “I am going to admit you.”

I started to panic. I wasn’t ready for this child to be born. I wasn’t ready to say good-bye.

“But, are you sure? I mean, the nodes were constantly falling off, and then the nurse stunned him with that gun thingy, and he practically tried to crawl out of my uterus he was so scared. He just wouldn’t hold still. Can’t we just try again?”

“It really would be better to just admit you to labor and delivery, hook you up to their machinery, and get a better look at what is going on.”

They must have sensed that I was planning an escape, because they escorted me, like a criminal, to the seventh floor of Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center and admitted me to the maternity ward, advising me that delivery might take place later that night.

When I entered my room, the nurse handed me a hospital gown and said I couldn’t have anything else to eat or drink. This was not good news because I was starving. While she promptly hooked me up to the fetal monitors, another nurse took my vitals, and a third nurse entered the room, carrying a clipboard and a pen.

“Hi! I’m going to ask you the questions that we ask all who are about to deliver. Okay?”

I nodded yes. I remembered fifteen years ago, almost to the exact day, when I entered the very same hospital after going into labor with Drew. I hadn’t gone through this intake process since then, because Ryan’s and MK’s deliveries were emergencies. When there is an emergency, they save these questions for later.

The nurse started with the basics: name, address, religious affiliation. I quickly spit out my answers, knowing in my heart that this baby was not coming today. The monitors were showing that Little Man was doing just fine. No need to worry. While I was giving the nurse my basic information, I wondered if these two knew about our situation. I decided that since I was certain that the delivery was not happening immediately, I wasn’t going to spill the beans about this whole mess and get all emotional.