Miracle Child Birth

I can remember exactly where I was when I found out I was pregnant. It was a perfect day and from that day, I knew my life would never be the same again. I wanted a water birth all natural with no painkillers and was preparing for a boring 40 weeks of pregnancy. Yeah right!!! LOL.

I had fibroids before I got pregnant and was advised not to take them out as they were too small to be significant and removing them could seriously affect childbirth due to their location. At 8 weeks of pregnancy, I began to bleed. The bleeding stopped after a couple of days and was replaced by the most excruciating pain I had ever felt. I soon learnt that it was due to re-degeneration of fibroid, which is fibroid growing so big in a short period of time that the blood supply into the fibroid cannot keep up with its growth causing the fibroid to either stop growing further or shrink into its self is a result of the presence of the pregnancy hormone progesterone. To put this into prospective, my fibroids grew from the size of a small walnut to the size of a big grapefruit in a period of 4 weeks!!! I was admitted into hospital and had to be given morphine as a result of the pain.....yeah that bad.

Anyway the pain stopped at week 15 and at week 20, just when I felt that it was okay to relax and enjoy my pregnancy again, the bleeding started. It was really little compared to what it was before and I wasn’t worried but decided to go into the hospital that day and waited 3 hours before I was seen. I remember waiting to be seen, playing my DS and thinking I would be home in time to watch prison break. When I finally got seen and explained to the doctor that I was just spotting with no pain and felt fine to go home, she agreed that since I was not having pain, it was probably okay and was about to send me home. At the last minute, she decided to do an internal examination. I could see the fear on her face as she went to get a more senior doctor. 5 minutes of waiting felt like 5 hours. The senior doctor came in with the midwife and they proceeded in telling me that it looked like my cervix had dilated and they didn’t think that the pregnancy would hold for more than another week and if I lasted longer, I will have to be admitted for the duration of the rest of the pregnancy. All I could do at that point was smile for some reason. I think I was going through a moment of temporary insanity. They wanted me to be seen by the on-call consultant so I was moved into the labour ward. The consultant came about 30 minutes later, by then I had called my husband (who works in the Middle East) to tell him what was up. The consultant decided to do another internal examination and as he was putting the speculum in, my water broke. At this point, I started to cry as I knew what that meant. I was told that due to my water breaking at week 20, I had no choice but to terminate the pregnancy and if I went into labour, which according to them will definitely happen (within the next 24 hours) they will not do anything to try to save the baby as he will be considered too premature to be saved because he had not reached the age of viability which was 24 weeks. Viability is the point at which a baby can be born with a slight possibility of not having permanent serious complications. I was then told that the best option was to terminate the pregnancy. After much thought, I told the consultant that since they said that the labour was inevitable at this stage, I will wait for that to happen and that if God wanted to end my pregnancy, then He will do it on His own with no help from me. That began my battle at the hospital.

After the doctors kept me in the labour ward for 2 hours and nothing happened, they decided to move me into the maternity ward. The next day, my consultant came to see me. She had nothing good to say about my situation and I could clearly see that she thought I was wasting her time by insisting on hanging on to the pregnancy. Thank God for the internet and my iPhone because my husband and I knew that if we wanted this baby, we would have to fight for him and ignorance wasn’t an option. He sent me a website link that told me all about my situation (PROM – Pre-term Rupture of Membranes). This site told you all you needed to know and the dos, don’ts and stories of other women who had been through almost the same thing. Kirk Franklin’s album, The Fight of My Life really expressed what I felt and I put all my trust and faith in God. The bible says a mustard seed faith moves mountains, I was praying for faith that was a quarter of a mustard seed.

All the doctors, particularly my consultant, wanted me to end the pregnancy and they had a point through their own human mind. Between weeks 19 – 24 of the pregnancy, the baby’s lung started to develop and is totally dependent on the presence of amniotic fluid in the womb of which I had no measurable amount. My husband finally came home for 2 weeks into this ordeal. One day, while he was there with me, another consultant came to see me. (He was Nigerian.) We got talking about my situation and when we asked him what he thought, he said medically, it didn’t look good but doctors were not God. That was all I needed. I kept asking God to get me to at least viability. The day after we saw the Nigerian consultant, my consultant came again. This time, she insisted that I went home as it was inevitable that I would go into labour and lose the baby and even if I made it to 24 weeks, there would be serious complications and I should terminate now. I was in so many tears after she left and my husband and I decided to switch consultants to the Nigerian consultant. That was the best decision ever. Another reason we decided to change was because she put me on a drug that made me bleed as an allergic reaction and would not listen when I told her. I was on another version of that same drug that did not have that reaction on me and even though I was on a much lower dosage to cause bleeding according to the clinical trials, it was making me bleed.

When we changed consultants, the first thing he did was to put me back on my old drugs. This was at 22 weeks plus. I was due an injection at 24 weeks to help develop the baby’s lungs and my new consultant decided to give it to me a day earlier. At 25 weeks and 4 days, my CRP was high. The major risk of carrying a pregnancy with no water is a risk of infection to the baby but most of all the risk of infection to the mother which carries a high possibility of permanent damage and/ or death. The CRP checks the infection rate in the blood and up till now, mine was very low and was checked every day. But on the day, it was extremely high. At this point, my doctor said the baby had to be born via emergency Caesarean. I consented to this and was taken in for an emergency CS. From the moment I was told about the C-section, I began to thank God. I did not ask for a single thing all I knew was that God was in control and His will be done. I called my husband, who was in Palestine at that time, and he said God was in control. Two hours to the C-Section, I began to write a letter to my son.

At about 3.30pm, I was wheeled into theatre, I had a peace about me that up till today, I don’t know where it came from. I went in with my mother in-law, introduced myself to the team and even cracked a few jokes with them. I knew God was in full control when I did not feel the pain of the epidural injection. One of the nurses turned to me and said that I was really brave and strong. I looked her right in the eye and said, “NOT MY STRENGTH BUT THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD”. I was awake throughout the procedure and sang praise and worship songs with my mother in-law from the moment they began till I was wheeled out of the theatre and fell asleep. And guess who delivered my baby? My initial consultant! God wanted her to know that He is JEHOVAH! He sits in heaven and the earth on His footstool....My baby was born at 16:18 to the voice of his mother and grandmother praising the Lord. He was alive!!!It took them 10 minutes to put in tubes to help him breath but....he was alive. That began our journey in Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU).

Unknown to me, after speaking to my husband, he told his boss what was going home and took the next flight home and about 15 minutes after I woke up (my mother in-law, father-in-law, sister-in-law and her husband were with me) my husband walked into the room. I had not seen my baby properly yet, apart from the 10 seconds they let me see him after he was born. I am a firm believer that GOD WILL NOT GIVE YOU WHAT YOU CANNOT CARRY. I needed my husband there with me for the first view of our son. In all the time i had been going through this and after, my husband had never been able to get a flight back from Israel in that short a time except for the day our son was born. At about 10.30pm, my husband and i met our miracle. JEHOVAH!!! He was so small with all these wires going in and out. He was smaller than his father’s palm. I didn’t know when tears started to roll down my face.

I will give a list of all the things that could go wrong and the statistics they gave us.
First, a recap:

1. My water broke at 20.3 weeks
2. My son was born at 25.4 weeks after being in the womb for 4 weeks+ with no waters.
3. A baby’s lungs start to develop from week 19/24 of gestation.
4. Between 20/27 of gestation, the baby’s lungs are still developing and the water in the womb is vital for the development of the lungs and breathing practice.
5. Other important things happening during this time includes brain development

Now i will go into what the risks were with my son.

1. Totally undeveloped lungs that there would have been no point hooking him up to a ventilator
2. Will need to have heart surgery to close the hole in the heart.
3. Being born with infection which can lead to death
4. Loss of sight
5. Loss of hearing
6. Perforation of bowels
7. Problem with urine
8. Brain damage

To understand what God has done, you need to hear what man said. The doctors said that we had about a 5% chance of my son being born and after that we had less than a 5% chance of him being born without any permanent severe damage of one form or another.

Now with everything my son went through, he was only born with chronic lung-disease (it sounds worse than it is). This is a term used for all babies who are born and have an oxygen dependency for longer than 7 days. After 96 days in SCBU, my son came home on oxygen and was off the oxygen 6 weeks after coming home. Apart from that and him looking small for his age, he suffered from none of the things listed above. His sight is perfect, he hears well and he is hitting all his milestones. He had a minor infection but that was it. He is beautifully and wonderfully made by HE who knew him while he was yet to be formed in my womb. I promised God that if HE did this, i would tell everyone about it.

Among other names, some of my sons’ names tell his story :

• Timothy(Hebrew meaning – The one who honours GOD)
• Jadidiah (Hebrew meaning- GOD’s beloved)
• Iyanuoluwa-Bamidele (Yoruba meaning – The miracle of GOD came home with me)
• Tamino-Saprebor (Rivers meaning – GOD stands with me)

If you know someone going through a similar thing, tell them my story and hopefully they will be encouraged.