By Kim, Fernley NV
PROM at 24 weeks + 2 days. Delivery at 27 weeks + 2 days.
Story added: 2011-07-13

At 23 weeks 4 days I rushed to the ER thinking my water had broke. Get your giggles out now, I thought I peed my pants also thank you! Once I got to the ER they did the test to see if it was amniotic fluid, sent me off to an ultrasound to check my fluid levels and the ABS (amniotic band syndrome). When I got back to my room I had staff members waiting. Ut oh that can't be good right? It wasn't. My water had sprung a leak. I was then airlifted into Reno, which had a level 3 NICU. Where I met the devil himself. I will protect him (you know slander suits or whatever) and not give his name. I will just call him Dr Evil. Dr Evil didn't trust the films from my ultrasound that I had less then an hour ago and threw them in the trash. You better believe I went trash diving, and I am now the proud owner of all the films. Dr Evil pulls in a dinosaur of a ultra sound machine and starts looking, and pausing and printing films. After what seems like a very long time, he turned the machine off gets an even more serious look on his face and says, "your baby is very sick." Well no crap man, my water just broke. He goes on to tell us my fluid levels were low, but not dangerous. What had happened was I didn't have ABS, I know your all wondering what is this ABS I am talking of. ABS is simple, the amniotic sac is made of two layers. At about 12-16 weeks these two layers fuse, giving us a normal sac. In the case of ABS, in most cases the inner sac ruptures leaving strings in the fluid, babies can get entangled and it can cause some pretty major issues. So we find that it is not ABS, what it is, my sacs didn't fuse, so it appeared that I had ABS. But it gets better, first, the outer sac ruptured, leaving the inner sac intact. Second Caden's heart was 60% enlarged, and he had a fluid build-up around it.Third, it appeared the placenta had separated a little. Dr. Evil then suggests we terminate the pregnancy, because this baby will not live 24 hours past birth. There was not a hesitation in my voice when I told him in the nicest way to go jump off a bridge. I was monitored for 48 hours getting the nice little swab up the va-jay-jay twice a day until they found I was no longer leaking fluid. But Dr. Evil, just what a wonderful man, told the nurses not to monitor the baby, because he was not viable, and was probably going to die anyway. So I am released to go home on modified bed rest, I could get up for short amounts of time. I could still work, since my job was no harder then getting up and going pee anyway. At 24 weeks 2 days I am taking a phone call and I feel a little wet, I think nothing of it, and continue with the phone call. Within minutes I had fluid running down my legs. Uh huh I know your thinking again that I had just peed my pants. I go to use the restroom and find I am covered in blood. I make the phone calls and head to the ER. I am hooked up, and left overnight. The next morning Dr Wonderful comes in, he does the ultrasound to find that Caden had NO fluid left. Both sacs had ruptured. He checked Caden's heart and agreed it was a little big, and yes it had fluid around it, but he was not real worried. I would meet with a pediatric cardiologist and let him decide what needed to be done if anything. It turned out that Dr Evil was wrong, the issues were minor, not life threatening, and nothing that couldn't be fixed in no time at all. The rest of the weekend was a blur of needles, and doctors. I was given the odds, I was told that if Caden was born that weekend, if he survived he might have some major disabilities. I was told the goal was 28 weeks, at 28 weeks he was golden. I found that 50% of pprom (preterm prolonged rupture of membranes) cases deliver within 24 hours. 50% of the remaining pprom cases deliver within the first week, another 50% of the remaining deliver within the second week, leaving very few pregnant 3-4 weeks post pprom. I knew the odds were stacked against us. But I made a goal, 26 weeks, I would make it to 26 weeks. 26 weeks came, and went, and I was still pregnant. I made another goal, 28 weeks, I failed to make that goal. At 27 weeks 2 days, 3 weeks on the dot of pprom I woke to find that I was covered in blood. I was contracting every 45 seconds and the shots they were giving me were not working. It was decided that I was going to have Caden within 24 hours, we could do it now, when everyone was ready, or we could do it later, when no one was ready. Knowing what Caden was going to face, we decided to go ahead with the c-section, we didn't have a choice on how he was going to be born, babies don't come out sideways, and we didn't know really how bad Caden's heart was. At 4:32 pm on November 19, 2008 Caden came into this world. He didn't cry, he didn't make a sound. We didn't expect him to, but it was tense. He scored 5/9 on his first apgar, and 8/9 on his second. He was 2 lbs 7 oz 14 inches long. My first sight of him was when he was at least 15 minutes old. I had no idea how little he really was, they had him so bundled that he looked the size of a normal newborn, well except the vent tube that made him look like a little fish on a hook. It wasn't until well after midnight that I got to see him. Here was this little tiny guy no bigger then a one liter bottle in the middle of machines and wires. I could tell you all the horrible NICU stuff, but I won't. It was a very long journey, 10 weeks 4 days. Seeing Caden drop as low as 1.5 lbs, to seeing him on vents, and CPAP, and under lights with little shields for his eyes. To seeing his heart rate drop from a normal 150 to 50, and knowing the only way to get it up was to startle him. From feeding issues, to breathing issues. But we all survived. Caden, Caden is a fighter. We gave him the chance at life, and he grabbed it and held on. His heart issues resolved themselves. We have seen warning signs for some disabilities, but he pushes through. In the last 15 months Caden has went from a 2 lb baby that was not expected to live 24 hours, to a 24 lb baby that is onto everything, and into everything. He is my miracle, every little achievement is something we were told 16 months ago that we would never see. Every pound he puts on, is another pound away from his start. Are we out of the woods, no. There still could be issues that we have not discovered, but those issues, no matter what they are, are mild in comparison to what we have went through, and what we could have went through.