When Hope Arrived

Disclaimer: There may be some TMIs about bodily fluids, and I can't promise the post will be short enough to be reader friendly.

There are many ways to tell this story. This one is mine. 

End of May: I'm nearing the end of my second trimester and starting to get wetness in my undies. I figure, since I have fibroids and therefore am much larger and heavier than my stage of pregnancy, it could just be more pressure than my bladder can handle. So I start wearing liners, but they are not sufficient, so I upgrade to pads. I mention it to my doctor a few days in, because the possibility of amniotic fluid crosses my mind. He advises me to check for the smell...there is none, but I wonder if my senses are off. I've been having more than the regular amount of doctors visits because of the fibroid complications. My next appointment is pretty soon, so I go in then and get tested (though I don't feel much leakage that day). The test is negative for amniotic fluid. Baby is very active, has fluid all around her. All looks well, and there's nothing to worry about. Though the  doctor didn't say what the liquid was, he was happy to know that neither my health nor the baby's health was in danger. 

Medical note: if your water breaks it means that the protective amniotic sac is no longer keeping out bacteria from the baby/uterus. According to Google (my super reliable medical source), you wouldn't want that to remain unchecked for more than 24 hours so some sort of intervention is needed: Anything from antibiotics to hospitalisation, depending on the needs.  

June: I've been monitoring my new leaky symptom. It fits the nickname a few people use for me. (Leeca...Leecy...leaky...get it?). It's an inconvenience but what's a little pee in the grand scheme of pregnancy? It still has no smell, but I assume I'm just well hydrated or something. I notice there's more of it when I move around a lot (and by a lot I mean walking through the supermarket). I also had a placenta previa diagnosis so I was taking things super easy anyhow.

June 8: Baby is 26 weeks old. The Lord had lain on my heart to pray about this date since the various complications in the 1st Trimester started. I really wanted to get past here. Before this point, a baby would not survive outside the womb in the Caribbean. I was so excited in the morning when I woke up, checked the date, and realised we'd finally gotten here! 

June 18: Regular doctors check-up. Baby looks great on ultrasound. I'm also fine. All is well.

June 20: Father's Day and Judah's birthday. We go out to lunch after church. (More movement than I'm used to), so I do expect more fluids and am not alarmed when I have to change more often than normal.

June 21: Take Judah out for his birthday. I stay seated for most of the activity and do not exert myself in any way except to take a few pictures and videos. I feel fine, but I somehow still want to be extra careful (Holy Spirit right there!) though I have no reason to be, now with the placenta previa gone. (The placenta moving up and out of danger is a whole other miraculous testimony)

June 22: I'm not feeling too good. I think I'm just exhausted from the longer than normal weekend. So I head to bed early. My normally large, pregnant appetite is not there so I didn't eat much (See the Holy Spirit again? Spoiler alert: with an emergency surgery in a few hours, it is safest to fast)

Midnight: I'm awoken by an incredible pain in my lower abdomen. It isn't like a contraction, not radiating. But it is so severe that I can't get up and out of the bed without help. 

I take a panadol and wait for it to kick in but waves of nausea start. Waves that would normally accompany contractions. But I'm not having waves of pain...the pain remains fervent. I do eventually throw up and the pain eases then returns, but in waves this time. These seem more like contractions now. I WhatsApp my God-send of a Doctor, who responds quickly and tells me to head in to the hospital, advising that they will give me something to stop the contractions.

We call the grandparents who come out of their blissful sleep and pick up the boys right away. Me and Mario make the 20 min drive, traffic free.

June 23, 1am: The hospital is nice and quiet, I'm seen quite quickly. Everyone is polite and nice (prayers sent up 5 minutes prior already answered). I get up to the labour ward, give my history to the nurse, then she calls Doc 1. I tell the whole story again. She calls Doc 2, someone more senior. Repeat. Other exams are done. They conclude that I am dehydrated and it is causing my tachycardia and the baby's tachycardia too. We are both monitored continuously and I am given IV fluids. The hope is that the fluid therapy will stabilise my heart rate, help the contractions to stop, and we'll be good to go. As time passes, my pain subsides for the most part, contractions have indeed slowed down significantly. But my heart rate and baby's heart rate are still high. So Doc 2 calls Doc 3, who has yet a higher seniority ranking. She asks for an ultrasound to be done. 

(I do mention twice that my darling husband is outside, asking for him to come in, but he hasn't been allowed yet amidst the various checks. I try to keep him updated on Whatsapp)

Ultrasound: I'm the only one around for miles. The room is dark. Three doctors stare at the monitor in silence. Do I interrupt? I am often thought of as rude for asking too many questions. It is not proper Bajan manners. But I feel the nudge and I say one sentence: "Is there fluid around the baby?"

Doc 3: Why would you ask that? 

Me: Because I've been leaking fluid for 3 weeks

Doc 3 to Doc 1 and 2: Why has nobody told me this? A patient comes in with tachycardia and is losing fluid and nobody mentions this to me? (She continues to 'teach' the other doctors. I remain silent.)

Doc 3 to me, turning the screen so I can see: "This dark area here around the baby may seem like fluid, but on closer inspection it is actually the umbilical cord. There is no fluid around the baby. It is likely that the tachycardia is from an infection."

She gets a speculum and has a look and immediate notices purulent discharge then again turns to the 2 younger doctors, wondering how they had neither noticed nor mentioned this fluid in their earlier examinations.

The interactions continue for a short while then she finally explains that we have to take the baby out right away. She would have to consult her senior (how many levels of superiority are there in hospitals???), but she was sure there wasn't much time to wait. I ask again for my husband, and she sends for him right away.

I head back from the ultrasound area to the room to be prepared for surgery. Mario walks in. The WiFi isn't very strong in that area and he hasn't received my message yet. So when I ask him if he's ready to meet his daughter, he's taken aback. I explain quickly and as I do, a wave of emotions hits me. I start to cry, but don't really have a chance to let it out because a paediatrician has come to speak with me. Baby has a 50% chance of survival, I'm told. I have to sign consent forms and strip naked in front of strangers to be prepped for surgery. But Mario is with me now. We don't talk, we don't need to. Somehow there's a calm. A peace. I pull my big girl undies up and do all the adult things and ask all the reasonable questions.

An ultrasound is repeated, this time for Doc 3, who will be my surgeon, to do surgeon-y anatomical type checks. They do 2 Covid swabs, but still have to do surgery in a special theatre for patients with unknown results. Mario has to wait outside.

Surgery: Everyone is in full PPE. I can't recognise a soul. The door swings open and there's a smiling face waiting to greet me (Don't ask how I know it's a smile). The person introduces themself as someone I know through my community of faith. What a blessed surprise! I prayed specifically for good people to be around me when I arrived. QEH is a great medical institution. They are knowledgeable and have state of the art equipment, etc. But the fact remains that there are more patients than any nurse or doctor can handle. So burnout is expected. And you may just happen to catch a tired nurse on the tail end of a shift who will give you attitude or be dismissive. So I prayed for good people and wisdom for the staff. It was already being answered, but this was like icing on cheesecake. I'd have a family member (God's family) with me. But it doesn't end there!

What do you call icing on top of icing? I call it Khara. I'm tempted to give a full biography on her and how much she means to my family, but that would take a book. Point is, I'm lying down, staring at the ceiling and I hear her sweet voice and recognise her comforting eyes. She's in full PPE too, but she isn't involved in the surgery so she stays by my head throughout the whole procedure, rubbing my shoulders and whispering things to me throughout. Oh my heart. Oh my Lord. How sweet and kind you are to send me an angel!

The lighting fixture above the surgery is reflective, but I don't mention it because it means I have a mirror to watch my own surgery. I've done surgeries before, so I don't think I'll faint or anything and this way I'll be guaranteed to see my sweet baby girl at least once before they whisk her away. I still avert my eyes when the scalpel arrives, just in case I'm wrong. 

It takes longer than I like...I wanna just see her come out. But that's all in my head. I'm at a higher risk of bleeding for various reasons, and I can smell the cauterizer doing its work. 

The moment I'm waiting for finally arrives! Interestingly, they still have to 'push' her out, with pressure on the outside of my tummy, lol. She's breech so she comes out foot first, and she's kicking! There's more pulling to get the rest of her body out. The cord is around her neck, but they move so swiftly to cut it, it's just a fleeting moment. They move the curtain that's supposed to be blocking my vision, and put my baby up for me to see her...for about a 10th of a second. I glimpse her feet. But I am satisfied.

There's mention of the fact that there's visible signs of the infection in my uterus. The work continues to get me cleaned up and closed. 

The paediatrician comes by my head after spending some time with the baby and explains that she is not breathing and will be put on a ventilator so they have to rush off but since I had asked before surgery, she flashes the baby's face for me to see. Another 10th of a second, but I etch every inch of that forehead and those 2 eyes into my memory as fast as I can. She's gone to the NICU. I'm hoping they have to push her past Mario outside. 

The morning dawns on the rest of Barbados and instead of an August/September baby, I have a June baby! 

I feel zero fear. Zero. Instead my heart is filled with gratitude because so much has gone right. If this baby came 2 weeks earlier, she would not have lived even as long as she already had. If my amniotic fluid test came back positive, what might have happened then? How has she survived 3 weeks with all her juicy protection leaking out? All I can see is God's hand intervening and saving my baby. Was my very scary placenta previa diagnosis really meant to keep me still long enough to let her stew pass the 26 weeks? Was the timing of my getting pregnant (after years of infertility) during a pandemic all part of a grand plan for me to be home most of the time? 

The grandparents taking the boys.

No other women in the labour ward that night and therefore having an abundance of doctors and nurses at the QEH when most medical facilities are understaffed because of the pandemic...and not one single miserable nurse in the lot. 

Super Doc #3 making the right call, at the right time. 

Being a citizen of Barbados, where everything is free from start to finish. No questions of medical insurance, just care. 

The Lord prepared my mind. He'd been giving me dreams. The thing about dreams is you don't really know if they are from the Lord until after they come true or not. So I decided to pray when I had a dream. You can't go wrong doing that. So I had a dream a few days before, and it really upset me. I can't remember the details, but it involved fluids and spaghetti. And the baby had come and my parents were freaking out. So I had a chance to process what it would be like if she did indeed come. And I prayed for her. And I believe that this is why I could rejoice when she arrived instead of being worried. 

Let's get messy for a second, Christians. What's there to be scared about? That the baby gets to see Jesus? That I get to see Jesus? See? 

It would break my heart. It would break me, not gonna lie. But I think we fill our minds with lies from our culture more than we fill our minds with God's word. I know I make that mistake. 

I'm in the hospital now, as I type. I didn't know if I'd go home 2 days ago because of how sick I felt from losing so much blood during the surgery and my body fighting the horrible infection. And as someone else's blood was pumped into my veins, I did worry about what would happen to my husband and my 3 half orphaned children.

How does a man like Job, who has just been told that his ten babies are dead say "Blessed be the name of the Lord"??? How do you get there? Job 1:22 says 'In this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.'

Why do we think death is wrong? Why are we upset when someone dies 'before the time'? I know the answers. I am human after all. But if we can truly dig into it, maybe we will find a flaw in our reasoning, and maybe we will then find comfort and then we can bless the Lord. 

 

Hope...I sometimes hated it because it meant I would look forward to a positive pregnancy test then have to deal with the emotional turmoil that followed when it didn't happen. It was easier to not hope. But it's a strange thing, cause sometimes I couldn't help but hope. 

I read Romans 12 a few months ago (It starts with a 'therefore', so Romans 1-11 are needed to give context to the commands given out next in Chapter 12). In Rom 12:12 I was reminded of true hope: That it's not so much about the uncertain dream that you want, but instead true hope lies in the reality of whether that thing is going to happen or not. "Rejoice in Hope" (but also be patient in tribulation and constant in prayer as you wait). What's this hope we can rejoice in? That we can be so sure it's gonna happen, even though it hasn't happened yet, that we can rejoice now? Salvation of course! It starts with a sure God. A sure removal of our sins. Not being an enemy of God anymore. Living with God now and then for eternity. The difficulties of this life are temporary and it will be gone before we know it and we will really rejoice. So let's start the party now!

Wisdom (or 'Sophia' in the Old Testament Greek when personified as a female e.g. Prov 3:13-18) tells us that this is what we should do. Have this hope. Rejoice!

And thus her name. 

"I can be glad for my hope is in the Lord. Cause He gives a confidence that this world doesn't know. He's the Lord of all creation and whatever the situation, I'm glad for my hope's in the Lord."- Larnelle Harris and the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir

June 26, 2021

Bird.