Hadley
When I was thirty weeks pregnant, I stood up from an afternoon of relaxing on the couch to let the dog out and felt the smallest trickle. I thought man- this baby must be laying right on my bladder! But still, the idea of that trickle nagged at my brain and kept me up to worrying (and googling) most of the night.
I called my OB office in the morning and they agreed to see me. I barely kissed my kids goodbye, assuming I’d be cozily back at home within an hour or two. At the doctor’s, they said it didn’t look like my water had broken but they wanted to send me to the hospital for one more test, just in case.
The test involved taking a swab of fluid and putting it in to a solution. If it turned blue, the fluid is amniotic fluid. The solution turned blue within seconds. And my entire universe flipped upside down. I called my mom, who was working a few floors away, and tearfully asked her to come sit with me. In minutes, I was informed I needed to choose a hospital to be sent to as they couldn’t care for such a premature baby. I was given a shot of steroids for lung development and a drip of magnesium to help protect the baby’s brain. The magnesium made me feel anxious and hot and sleepy, all while I was navigating a terrifying and unexpected reality. A gentle and kind OB I had never met before performed a bedside ultrasound and explained the steps of what would happen next. I had to facetime my kids and try to explain things to them in a way that wouldn’t completely traumatize them while I was still trying to understand it myself.
In under an hour, I was strapped to a gurney, with a box of tissues in my lap, and wheeled in to the back of an ambulance. My mom tried to hold back her own tears as she watched me leave. The nurse who had been in the OR when Everett was born rode in the ambulance with me- which was a gift but also a reminder of the sort of experience I was no longer going to get to have.
My arrival at Mass Gen was a whirlwind. Shawn joined me and there were more ultrasounds, IV antibiotics, more information. I was told that when water breaks early, 50% of people deliver within 24 hours. Of the half that don’t, half of those people deliver within one week. We were given a series of goal posts- make it 24 hours. Make it to 48 hours past the last steroid shot to be considered “beta complete”. Make it to 32 weeks, then the ultimate goal- 34. We had questions answered with words like cerebral palsy, intubation, brain bleeds. Complicating things further, we had been monitoring the baby’s growth since 20 weeks as she was consistently measuring about two weeks behind and was considered growth restricted. The likelihood of an absolutely tiny baby was very high. Almost every person who walked in the room reminded me I would remain hospitalized until I delivered, hopefully a full month. With covid restrictions, Shawn was the only visitor I was allowed during specified hours of the day. I couldn’t see my kids. That was the detail that broke me wide open.
Later that night, I was settled in to a room on the antepartum unit. When Shawn finally had to leave, I put Grace & Frankie on my ipad and tried to cry quietly enough that I didn’t disturb my roommate. I didn’t sleep, not even for a minute. After the five roommates I cycled through during my time in the hospital, I came to understand that those first night tears are not disturbing or an inconvenience- they’re a right of passage.
I decided to take everything an hour at a time. Those hours turned in to days and the days eventually became weeks. I developed iron clad, slightly insane rituals born out of my need to control literally any aspect of my life. I ate the same things for every meal, watched the same show to fall asleep at night (but never during the day) and took a daily nap after lunch. I read Everett his bedtime stories via FaceTime. I always walked Shawn down to the exit, waiting with him in line as he ordered a cold brew coffee and a chocolate chip cookie for his drive home. I never let him deviate because I was certain something awful would happen overnight if he did.
Our community showed up in ways I could never have imagined. My parents moved in to our house to take care of the kids. People found ways to connect with me, dragging me out of isolation. My best friend pretty much single handedly fed my family, while simultaneously putting eyes on my kids so she could assure me they were doing just fine. My husband drove to Boston and back, every single day. Often just to sit in silence with me, to make sure I didn’t feel alone.
Most of my days were painfully monotonous- like groundhogs day- and I liked it that way. I developed friendships with the medical students and residents and nurses caring for me. I missed birthdays and first days of school. I saw Grace and Everett exactly twice, outside. Shawn and I held hands and laughed over episodes of Ted Lasso. And every night, I quietly thanked my body and my baby for staying put.
In the week before Hadley was born, I started bleeding. It was assumed that I had a small placental abruption, when your placenta starts to pull away from the uterine wall. This is a common occurrence when your water breaks early, and is one of the things that necessitates delivery (along with an infection or any fetal distress). But my bleeding kept resolving, stopping for hours or days before starting again. We were told four separate times that delivery was imminent, only for the team to change their mind.On Labor Day (ironically) we spent all day on the L&D floor on continuous monitoring. They didn’t let me eat or drink for 24 hours in case I needed a csection that day. After about eight hours on the monitor, there was a blip in the baby’s heart rate. The doctor on duty wanted to deliver. Shawn and I wanted to wait, to see if it happened again. Our nurse advocated strongly for us and the attending physician acquiesced. Our day shift nurse handpicked our night shift nurse, instructing her to lay on top of me if anyone tried to take the baby over night. I believe those nurses bought us an extra week of gestation for Hadley, as well as an extra dose of steroids. Nurses are heroes (no surprise there).
My feelings of being a literal ticking time bomb intensified. I stopped updating people, because I had nothing concrete to say. Shawn started sleeping at the hospital, on a couch in the family room.
As the weekend approached, the doctors told us it was unlikely we’d make it through the weekend without a baby. The threshold to deliver lowered with every extra day that passed. I jokingly said any day would be fine, but would prefer if we skipped over 9/11, for obvious reasons. It became a running joke with the MFM team assuring me that noted my preference in my chart.
By Saturday (9/11… you see where this is going) I had hit 33 weeks and my bleeding had slowed again. I even let myself wonder if we might actually make it to the revered 34 weeks. Around 4:30 that afternoon, I got up to use the bathroom and I will spare the details, but it became quickly apparent that things had changed. It was the scariest medical moment of my life and I was sincerely worried for my own health for the first time in the entire ordeal. I tried to keep my voice calm as I called out to Shawn to get the nurse. As she opened the door, she immediately yelled out for more help. People moved around me quickly and I was ushered on to a gurney. I don’t think I took another full breath until I was in labor and delivery triage and I could hear the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor, strong and steady as always. She tolerated every new turn with very little fuss. My body was failing her, but she remained steadfast. The resident who would be doing my c-section was the same one who admitted me the day I arrived and I was so grateful for his familiar face. Things moved very quickly as I tried to hold back my tears. It is a strange and unique betrayal to be afraid instead of excited at the prospect of meeting your child. I’m not sure I’ll ever make peace with feeling that way. I also felt guilt at being somehow relieved that this part of the rollercoaster was coming to an end.
In the operating room, an anesthesia intern spent forty painstaking minutes trying to place my spinal anesthesia while I bled and bled and bled. Shawn, having been told it would only take twenty, anxiously paced in a room outside. A nurse held my shoulders and tried to distract me as we discovered we both lived in North Hampton and had boys in preschool. There was talk of putting me under general anesthesia as it was taking so long for me to become numb which would have been devastating, so I added that to the silent prayers repeating desperately over and over again inside my head. The attending physician lowered herself to the floor to clean up my blood because she heard Shawn didn’t do well with the sight of it- a quick act of kindness that touched me so deeply in the moment.
At 5:46 pm, Hadley Laurentina made her entrance. They dropped the surgical drape (while Shawn squeezed his eyes shut) and I got the briefest glimpse of her, delivered in to a strange plastic bag to help her stay warm, before she was whisked out of my sight. I listened hard for her cry, but it never came. I think Shawn and I were both trying to put brave faces on for one another as we waited those few minutes that felt like an eternity. I knew things weren’t dire when they finally called Shawn over to see her. He snapped a few quick pictures before they wheeled her out of the operating room. The first in a series of tiny heartbreaks, to be separated like that so immediately after months and months of being perpetually together.
Once I was in recovery, Shawn went to the NICU to be with the baby. Alone and entirely numb from the waist down, I was encouraged to start pumping pretty immediately. Coaxing my body to make milk for a baby I had barely laid eyes on. Not quite the golden hour all expectant mothers hold sacred. The first time I really laid eyes on her was via FaceTime, surreal and sweet.
Eventually, I was declared stable and was allowed to be taken on a gurney to the NICU to meet her, about 4 hours after she was born. I leaned over her isolette and touched her tiny soft toes. I asked over and over “is she okay?” and was assured she was. She was. But even still, there was oxygen in her nose and an IV in her arm and she looked impossibly small. I knew how much worse things could be, because I had been warned of all the terrifying possibilities on a loop in the weeks before. My baby, who I had talked to and worried for and wondered about was here in front of me. Yet, I couldn’t hold her or feed her or even change her teeny tiny diaper. I was stripped of my mothering ability, reduced to…something else. I thought I had prepared myself for these eventualities but as it turns out, you just can’t. We couldn’t stay in the NICU for very long as I still needed frequent vitals so for the second time in just a few hours, we were apart again.
That night was really hard for me. I was so thankful that Hadley was doing well that I rallied against my own sadness because I thought to even acknowledge it was ungrateful, tempting fate. It was another night I didn’t sleep at all, pumping every two hours and waking Shawn to deliver the pitiful drops of colostrum to the NICU because I still couldn’t move. It was the only thing I could do to nurture my daughter, I didn’t want to miss a single drop. I was sweating with the hormone come down, itching as the pain medicine wore off. Every few minutes I tried to move my leaden, useless legs because I knew once I could stand up on my own I could get back to Hadley.
I was back in the NICU before six am the next day and got to hold her for the first time a few hours later. I’ve barely let go since.
Today is Hadley’s due date. Although she never would have been born today (as a repeat c-section, she would’ve been born at 39 weeks), it still feels heavy to me. I am still struggling to metabolize how I feel about the entire experience.
I am so happy that she is here and healthy. She needed minimal respiratory support and had no medical complications. It was the best case scenario we could’ve hoped for. She was and is so strong, even when she only weighed three and a half pounds. I often borrowed my strength from her. But, as a friend of mine who has experienced this too and has become my defacto grief guru reminded me- there is power in AND. I can be thankful AND angry. I can be happy when I see friends (and even strangers) healthy and heavily pregnant AND so sad that my final pregnancy ended way too soon. I can acknowledge that so many people experience much worse AND need to heal from all we went through. I sobbed my way through my six week follow up, but today I found some maternity clothes at the bottom of our hamper and didn’t cry.
I will be forever changed for this experience and at first, that thought terrified me. But something shifted dramatically within me with the birth of each of my children- this one was so different, but somehow the same. It has strengthened and also softened me, the way only tiny babies can.
So, happy due date, Hadley girl. Seven extra weeks of loving her and she has been worth it all.
