Madden’s Story – An Amazing Little 25 Weeker

Posted on February 22, 2012 by

Today we are getting the pleasure of reading Madden’s story, the story of an amazing 25 weeker.  His mom Angie Martinez, a fellow Preemies Today member, kindly shared their story with us and it really touched our hearts.  It’s a wonderful story of hope and strength to other moms facing the same or similar situation.  Enjoy!

Angie also created a blog that shares her full story.  She created it in hopes that other moms out there could gain some hope on their preemies.  She stated that, “When I was on bed rest I searched the internet constantly looking for stories that would give me the strength to keep laying down and positivity that he would be ok”.

You can check out her blog at:  http://mylifeasamom-angie.blogspot.com/

Thank you Angie!

~Audrey Lee

Madden’s Story – 25 Weeks

Weight 2.2 lbs

Height 13”

I found out at 23 weeks pregnant that I had an incompetent cervix and was put on strict bed rest.  I was able to keep my sweet little boy in for 2 more weeks but ended up in labor and delivery and delivered a beautiful baby boy named Madden.  They instantly took him and put him on the vent.  However, they said his coloring was great and they had never seen a 25 weeker look so pink.

Madden On The Day He Was Born - Photo Courtesy Of Angie Martinez

Madden was in the hospital from February 13th to May 1st.  He was on the vent for about 2 weeks, the came off of that and went on C-Pap.  After about 3 weeks on C-Pap they put him on a nasal cannula.  The only problems that he was having were apnea spells and bradycardias.  He would have them several times a day so they would increase the flow of his cannula or the amount of oxygen.  Of course we were worried because to us the thought of him not breathing or his heart rate slowing down was very scary.  However, after several weeks on the cannula we could see signs that he was getting better.  They removed the cannula and he was breathing room air!

He continued to have bradys and apnea here and there.  The rule was he had to go 5 days with no spells before he could go home.  We were 10 minutes away from taking him off his monitors and he had a brady and apnea spell.  Therefore they doctors said he needed to go home on an apnea monitor.  We got one and he came home 2 days later and is a sweet healthy baby boy!  No one can believe now that he was so tiny!

Another milestone for Madden was his brain scans.  For the first 5 days no one could touch him except when necessary by the nurses.  On the 6th day he had a brain scan, it came back clear!  No signs of a brain bleed!  What a huge thing for him!  All the doctors and nurses went on and on about how good this was for him!  On day 14 he had another one and again it came back clear!  The next one was scheduled for day 40 of his life and amazingly it came back clear as well!  Amazingly my sweet 25 week baby was doing great.  Minus a few apnea spells and getting a minor urinary tract infection he had no issues!

He just turned 1 on February 13, 2012.  He is right on target for his corrected age and weighs about 24 lbs!  He’s a very healthy sweet baby boy!

Madden On His First Birthday - Photo Courtesy Of Angie Martinez

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The first time I saw you…first time I touched your hand

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

Photo courtesy of Audrey Lee

This morning while sitting at my desk (it’s a slow Friday :-) ) I was thinking about the first time I saw my eldest daughter…the first time I touched her.  I had a C-section, but due to hemorrhaging I don’t actually remember seeing her in the operating room before they rushed her to the NICU.  We have a personal video of me brushing past the tubes to kiss her little head before they took her away but I have no recollection of this.

I remember that night after surgery, after waking up from anesthesia (I eventually ended up being put under general during the operation after she was born), calling everyone and telling them that I had just had the most beautiful baby in the world.  My friends asked me what she looked like and I said, “I have no idea…but she’s beautiful!”  Ha-ha!  My husband had brought up a picture for me but my eyes were so blurry from the medication that I couldn’t focus on it.

I hadn’t been able to sleep at all even though everyone tried their best to get me to relax.  I needed to see my baby, I needed to touch her.  All I knew was I went into surgery with my baby and I was in recovery without her.  I knew she was premature and in the NICU but I wasn’t processing everything too well emotionally.  My husband tells me I kept whispering under my breath that they took my baby and that he needed to help me go get her (me talking on morphine :-) ).  I think it was probably from the weeks of the doctors saying that they didn’t know when they were going to have to, “Take the baby by emergency C-section.”

The next day I struggled to get the strength and feeling back in my legs so that I could get to the NICU to see her.  I’ll never forget my husband saying ever so sweetly to me, “Honey, are you ready to see your baby?”

You know, I had always dreamed of delivering my baby and seeing  my little wrinkly newborn laying across my chest and combing over every little feature…looking deeply into her eyes.

Well he wheeled me past one large room full of babies and into another just the same where alarms were going off everywhere.  There were beeps and bells, and the buzz of respirators…the sounds of the NICU…they stay with you forever.  Eventually the noise becomes normal, and part of the ebb and flow of the preemie daily life, but not that soon…not yet.

I didn’t know which bed he’d stop at…which bed belonged to our baby?!  There were dozens and dozens of babies and I had no clue which was mine.  It’s a strange feeling you know?

It sort of reminds me of when I was a child and my parents took me to visit Cabbage Patch Land in Georgia.  This is a place where Cabbage Patch Kids are “born” and there are tons of them under this tree…and you don’t know whether they are boys or girls or if they are big or little…there are even preemies.  I remember there were so many Cabbage Patch babies there and you wouldn’t know which was the lucky one that would be picked to be yours.  Well, finding out which preemie was mine sort of felt just as strange.  (The place is still in business:    :-)   http://www.cabbagepatchkids.com/visit/).

He pushed me over to the corner bed in room 203, the room where the sicker and smaller of the babies were…and helped me stand.  He pulled back the blanket from on top of her bed and said, “There she is, there’s your baby girl.”

It’s funny, he could have told me any of those babies were mine and I would have believed him…funny how this experience changes everything.   I looked down at her ever so tiny body, and I wanted to just caress it.  I went to rub her leg and he stopped me, he said that he was told by the doctors just to touch her with even pressure.  There was so much I had to learn…

In that moment, I touched her little hand and she grabbed my finger.  He said, “That’s our baby!”

And I…I told her, “I love you!”

I was so exhausted that I had to sit, and frankly, I felt I could faint.  She kept grabbing my finger ever so tightly and I rested my head against the plastic of her isolette.  Somewhere between, “I love you” and a few tears, I feel asleep with my head against the plastic.  We both had a little nap touching each other for the first time.  I think I was finally able to breathe a bit once I saw her.  We did have that moment I guess…it was just a bit different.  It would still be a while till I could hold her and forever it seemed till I could look her in the eyes really…and check out every feature of her little body.  But I’ll never forget that precious moment together.

I always keep a photo at my desk of the first time I touched my daughter.  I have the same picture framed in my house as well, and I make sure to look at it daily.  It marks the start of our NICU journey before she became really sick with complications and lost so much weight.  It marks the brief moment before the roller coaster truly began. Looking at this photo makes the triumph even more rich.  It brings back one of my strongest memories of motherhood and the immediate love I felt the moment I saw her tiny face.  My husband had captured a picture of her hand holding my finger.  When I look at it, it’s a testament of the impossible coming to pass since we found out at 21 weeks that we’d probably never make it to that moment.

So today, just think about that precious moment where you held or touched your little one for the first time.  It was magical, wasn’t it?!

~Audrey Lee

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31 Weeker Gets A Pacemaker 15 Minutes After Birth!

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

Little Jaya Maharaj, whose name in Hindi means victorious, underwent heart surgery to implant a pacemaker just fifteen minutes after her birth according to reports from the Associated Press.  She is one of the smallest recipients of a pacemaker in the world.  A team of doctors at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital performed the surgery on little Jaya to try to save her from dying of a severe heart problem.  The doctors determined that for her best chances of survival, Jaya was to be born nine weeks prematurely so she would have the best organ development yet less risk of dying from her heart failing before delivery.  Doctors also determined that she had only hours to live if they did not perform the surgery.  Jaya was born with a heart rate of 45 beats per minute whereas a healthy newborn heartbeat is 120 to 150 beats per minute. Dr. Katsuhide Maeda, the surgeon who stitched the pacemaker’s electrical leads to Jaya’s walnut-sized heart stated, “The only way to save this baby was to deliver the baby right away and then implant the pacemaker.”  It was during a routine prenatal visit, that Jaya’s parents, Leanne and Kamneel Maharah were told by doctors that their child’s heart rate was dangerously low.  Jaya suffered from a congenital heart block caused from her mother’s immune system mistakenly attacking the nerve fibers that cause the fetus’ heart to beat.  Though the prognosis was grim, the doctors felt that if they could induce labor as early as possible to correct the ailment before her heart failed, it could give Jaya the best chance possible. Counseling by neonatologist Dr. Valerie Chock was used for determining when the baby should be born since it involves a delicate set of calculations. According to Dr. Chock, the baby should be delivered as soon as possible while still allowing her to gestate so her organs develop enough to support life outside the womb.  “Unfortunately, a lot of babies in this position don’t even survive childbirth,” Chock said.  At Jaya’s delivery a team of about 20 assembled to handle the procedure with speed, precision, and care.  Jaya was born at three and  half pounds and with her heart beating so slowing, doctors had no choice but to immediately open her chest and perform the operation.  The heart surgeon said that typically, he would connect the wires attached to a pacemaker outside the body then perform a second surgery weeks later to install a permanent device but instead decided to tackle the more difficult challenge of inserting the permanent pacemaker immediately to avoid the second surgery. Jaya’s current pacemaker should last around ten years.  Chief pediatrician at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., Dr. Dr. Michael Artman, who is a neonatal cardiologist (and also not connected to the Standford operation in any way) spoke to the magnitude and impressive accomplishment of this sugery.  He said that this should encourage other children’s hospitals to undertake similar efforts and frankly, I couldn’t agree more!  Dr. Artman states, “What really distinguishes this is just the fragility of this premature baby and the condition in which this baby was born,”

Jaya’s parents are pleased to report that today she is a thriving eight pound three month old!

Kamneel Maharaj is quoted as saying, “Whenever we were worried, she would kick from inside and say, ‘I’m here; I’m alive!’ ‘We thought maybe she was trying to tell us that everything was OK, so we were always hopeful.”

Read more:

http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/16/15-minute-old-newborn-gets-pacemaker-for-the-heart/#ixzz1me89QjKz

http://www.todayonline.com/World/EDC120216-0000092/15-minute-old-newborn-gets-pacemaker-for-heart

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Little Fighter Onsies To Benefit Preemies Today!

Posted on February 16, 2012 by

Babyfightgear.com

Babyfightgear.com has created a “Little Fighter” onesie and will be donating 100% of the proceeds to Preemies Today. Please check them out and help spread the word.

1. Go to our Facebookpage and like the post on “Little Fighter”

2. You can purchase one through babyfightgear.com

3. Share this information on your blog, Facebook page, or any other groups you have joined!

100% of the profits go to Preemies Today!! Please help spread the news and promote prematurity awareness!

http://babyfightgear.com/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&keyword=preemies+today&x=0&y=0

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Vitamin D and Pregnancy – More Important Than You Probably Thought

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

freeclipartpictures.com

Everyone knows the importance of vitamin D for growing strong and healthy bones.  We know that it is important to get plenty of vitamin D during our pregnancies to reduce many risks such as rickets, a condition linked to musculoskeletal and health complications.  In 2010, studies showed that women who take high doses of vitamin D pregnancy actually had greatly reduced risk of complications like gestational diabetes, preterm birth, and infection.  It has also been found that vitamin D can help reduce the risk of an infant contracting RSV.  Infants with deficient vitamin D levels are six times more likely to get the respiratory syncytial virus during their first year of life when compared to infants with high levels of vitamin D.  Then scientists found that there may even be a link to low vitamin D levels and the development of pre-eclampsia.  Then this week another link was shown by Australian researchers that gives evidence that pregnant women with low vitamin D levels may produce children at risk for language difficulties (The report was published in the Feb. 13 online edition of Pediatrics).

Over the past twenty years, vitamin D levels in pregnant women have steadily decreased and it is believed that women are becoming deficient in this particular vitamin because they have slowly been exposed to less sunlight.  People with dark skin pigmentation can need upwards of 20 – 30 times as much exposure to sunlight as fair-skinned people to generate the same amount of vitamin D.  Another problem is the food we eat is so over-processed that there is lack of vitamin D as well.

Doctors are now urging women to get their vitamin D levels checked and especially do it before getting pregnant.  If there is a problem, doctors can work on fixing it before pregnancy.  And during pregnancy, women should increase their vitamin D intake.

As a pseudo-hormone, vitamin D affects almost every system and organ in the body.  Now, I feel that I can’t talk about vitamin D without stressing the importance of sunlight.  No matter how many supplements you take, nothing will ever be able to replace the benefits and levels of vitamin D that can be processed in the body from sunlight.  Vitamin D is a vitamin that our bodies can actually manufacture through a complex relationship with sunlight and the cells in our lower skin (convert light energy into vitamin D).  Vitamin D absorbs dietary calcium and phosphorus from the intestines and suppresses the release of parathyroid hormone which causes bone resorption.

If we don’t make enough of  1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 which is the active metabolite of vitamin D, in the blood, the body cannot absorb and/or use the dietary calcium. When dietary calcium and the mineral phosphorus are not properly absorbed through the intestine, the body also cannot build strong bones and it puts both the mother and child at risk for many other complications.  How do you make 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 so that you can actually absorb the supplements you take and vitamins from your food?  Get some sunlight!  “In the winter, it’s impossible to produce vitamin D from the sun if you live north of Atlanta because the sun never gets high enough in the sky for its ultraviolet B rays to penetrate the atmosphere, yet in summer, experts say a fair skinned person going outside for 10 minutes in the midday sun (in shorts and a tank top with no sunscreen) will give the body enough radiation to produce about 10,000 international units of the vitamin.”

~Audrey Lee

http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20100504/high-doses-of-vitamin-d-may-cut-pregnancy-risk

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/09/vitamin-d-in-pregnancy-may-protect-infants-from-virus/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/18/us-vitamin-d-idUSTRE67H3CJ20100818

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070227105140.htm

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/02/13/moms-vitamin-d-levels-linked-to-language-problems-in-kids

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/heart/articles/2008/06/23/time-in-the-sun-how-much-is-needed-for-vitamin-d?page=2

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New Data Shows C-Sections Are Not Always The Best For Small Babies

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

A recent study shows that babies born via C-section rather than vaginally, who are small for gestational age have a higher rate of breathing problems.  This new study can likely change the thoughts and practices of physicians everywhere!

Check it out!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-500368_162-57374375/c-sections-not-always-best-for-small-babies/

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Free Montly Yoga Class For Mothers Who Have Lost

Posted on February 6, 2012 by

http://www.twotinyhands.com/2012/01/yoga-for-moms-on-2312-at-7-pm.html

http://www.clker.com/clipart-2499.html

Date: First Friday of Every Month

Time:  7 pm and lasts 75 minutes

Details:  All equipment is provided but you can bring your own mat if you would like.

SIDS Mid Atlantic is sponsoring a free yoga class once a month to mothers who have lost a child.  The class is a beginner yoga class and focuses on relaxing poses to encourage healing and restoration.  According to the ad on twotinyhands.com, to register you must contact Marsha McClellan who is the director at The Yoga Connection which is located in Manassas, Virginia.  You can also email twotinyhands@gmail.com for more information.

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