When I got pregnant with Sam, my first son, Tommy, was just over a year old, and still nursing.  I met a midwife named Stephanie while at a La Leche League meeting about a week after I conceived, and told her I'd call her when I got pregnant.  Boy was she surprised when I called her two weeks later!  She was working with two other midwives at the time, Mary and Ida, and the three of them handled my prenatal care.  I also saw a doctor twice and went through the usual tests, plus an ultrasound, which they talked me into on the basis that while it couldn't rule out any problems, I would at least know the baby didn't have anything "life-threatening." The ultrasound showed a boy, and we started talking about names.  We asked everyone for suggestions, because we couldn't come up with one we both liked.  One night my husband was talking to his mom, and she suggested "Nicholas, Samuel, Robert, or David."  I said, nah, I don't like any of those.  But over the next couple of days, I found myself thinking of the baby as "Sam."  Only once or twice at first, but by the third day, I couldn't imagine him being anyone but Sam.  I didn't know where it came from, I'd never known a Sam and I still wasn't sure I liked the name, but I knew he was Sam.  I decided he must have named himself, and I still believe that to this day!

I had preterm labor again with this pregnancy, and was pretty disappointed about it.  I had already weaned Tommy when I was about 5 months pregnant, because it was so very painful, so that wasn't an issue.  I was on bed rest and Brethine (a drug to stop contractions) again, but this time the doctor took me off of it at 36 weeks.  I was already three centimeters dilated, so I felt pretty confident the baby would come soon.

I woke up the next morning with that lovely "I can do anything" feeling.  My contractions were anywhere from 7 to 10 minutes apart, and we went to a few yard sales.  I called Stephanie around 10, and she came over with Mary and Ida.  Amy, a friend of mine, had agreed to come take care of Tommy, and she showed up around then, too.  We watched coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing on tv; it was the first anniversary.  It was a beautiful day, sunny but cool, and we went for several walks.  I loved the relaxed atmosphere; I didn't have to worry about when to leave, because i was already there! Tommy had a wonderful time playing with Amy.  Mary left after a little while, since three midwives just weren't necessary.  We decided around 6 o'clock that night to strip my membranes, because the contractions weren't getting any stronger but were too painful for me to rest.  I immediately started having, longer, more painful contractions.  I progressed well from then on, laboring in front of the couch, my head on Scott's (my DH, of course) lap, or I sat on the toilet.  I had Metallica playing on the stereo the whole time.  I had wanted to catch the baby, as I had my first, but at the last minute I found I couldn't get comfortable in any position but my hands and knees.  Still, I felt very strong and powerful.  I was so in tune with Sam; I talked to him while I pushed and I could feel him moving, feel him struggling to be born.  Stephanie broke my water because otherwise he'd have been born in the sac, and the next contraction I pushed him out into his father's hands.  I felt so wonderful, so powerful, I had faced the pain and rode it and changed it into a force capable of bringing a baby.  I remember laughing as I pushed.  Tommy had been awakened by my yelling, and Amy brought him in, but he was crying because he was sleepy and didn't know what was going on.  He settled down as soon as she got him a drink, though, and he came and sat with us on the couch.  He was only 19 months old, and basically was unimpressed by his brother.  I had a lovely herbal bath, first alone, then with the baby, ate a little, and then we all went to bed.  We spent the next three days at home, getting to know Sam and just relaxing.  I was very connected to him; I could tell when he was going to urinate when his diaper was off, I woke up before he did to feed him, and on the third night I woke up suddenly thinking "He's not breathing!"  I laid my hand on his back and he took a deep, shuddering breath.  I'll never know for sure if he'd stopped breathing then or not.

The next day while I was nursing him, I noticed he looked very dark all of a sudden.  I pulled him away from my breast and patted his back, asking "Sam?" and he looked normal again.  I didn't know what to think.  A little while later, I laid him on the couch so I could run to the bathroom, and before I got there my husband called me back in.  He was holding Sam, who looked blue again for a second, then was normal.  When I talked to my midwife that night, I was a little afraid to mention it.  He seemed to be doing so well otherwise, it was hard to believe that this was anything serious.  Stephanie was alarmed, but couldn't come herself because she'd been exposed to chicken pox, and was afraid of passing it to the baby, but she sent Mary and an apprentice.  They examined Sam and listened to his heart for a long time, but couldn't find anything wrong.  They recommended we take him to the doctor in the morning.  Then, while I was nursing him, he did it again.  I patted his back again and called his name.  He turned pink again all on his own, and never went limp, just stayed all tight with this intense look on his face.  Mary was clearly concerned; we discussed taking him to the emergency room, but we hadn't planned ahead well and didn't know if the military would cover it.  We decided after much consideration to take turns staying up all night with him, and to go to the emergency room if it happened again.  The next morning I called the clinic on base as soon as they opened and asked them what we should do.  The man was very mad at me, he said I shouldn't have "risked my baby's life over money!"  He told us to take him to the Children's Hospital immediately.  We took Tommy to a friend's and headed for the hospital.

They took their time about things, of course.  First a resident saw him, and said there didn't seem to be anything wrong with him, and then the attending came in.  I was nursing Sam, and the attending was in the process of blowing us off and sending us home when he did it again.  Although I was pleased that the doctor was now taking us seriously, I broke down when he grabbed Sam from my arms and ran down the hallway, yelling orders.  I will always remember how completely helpless I felt.  It took Sam much longer this time to start breathing again, I believe because the doctor scared him so bad.  He even peed on his tye, which amused me and the nurses much more than it did the doctor.

We spent the whole day in the emergency room while they ran tests.  They did an x-ray, which was quite horrible.  They had to smash him into this brace, to keep him in the right position, and he screamed hysterically the whole time.  They took lots of blood, ran some tests on his heart, including an ultrasound, which we pioneered a new technique for.  The ultrasound technician wanted him on the table, but he was sleeping so peacefully in my arms, he decided to try, and was amazed when Sam slept through the whole thing.  He decided it was actually easier that way, because Sam barely moved.  Everything was coming back normal, except that he was mildly polysythemic (too many red blood cells, or his blood was a little thick) and he was a bit jaundiced and dehydrated.  I think he was only dehydrated because they refused to let me nurse him all eight hours we were there.  Then they moved him to the NICU, where I was finally given a breast pump.  They did a saline transfer for the polysythemia, even though he wasn't at a level they usually treated.  He had an I.V. and all the monitors on him, and he looked absolutely miserable.  I wasn't allowed to nurse him very often; they gave him IV fluids instead and my breastmilk through a tube in his nose.  They moved him to a room where he had a roommate, and he had to stay under bili-lights for the jaundice, even though it wasn't really bad enough to need treatment.  They basically didn't know what was wrong with him, so they treated him for anything they could think of.  His roommate was bottle-fed, and his mom was only allowed to feed him every four hours, so every three hours we had to listen to him cry for an hour.  The mother was so jealous that Sam got breastmilk, either through nursing or the tube, every time he cried, while her baby had to settle for a pacifier. They decided Sam had quit breathing and turned blue due to a combination of the jaundice, the polysythemia, being dehydrated (yeah, right), and because he was a "preemie."  I wasn't aware that 36 weeks was considered premature, but that's what they kept saying.  Sam went home, five days after we'd first showed up.  He was on an apnea monitor.  The next evening as we were getting ready for bed, my husband was carrying him on his shoulder, burping him, and he did it again.  I cried all the way back to the hospital.  This time they put him on a ward.  They said he had reflux, that every time he ate it was coming back up and blocking his airway.  I thought they were nuts.  He'd never so much as spit up.  I stayed with him day and night, again.  I slept in a waiting room across the hall from the ward.  My husband brought Tommy to see us every day.  They did a barium swallow test, where they x-rayed him after drinking a bottle of this barium stuff to see if it came back up.  It came back up, so they started giving him medications to control the reflux. By this time, he had lost an entire pound since his birth one week ago.  When they put him on the medications, he gained back his birth weight, but then stopped.  He didn't lose weight, but he quit gaining entirely.  The doctors started talking about sending him home on the medications.  I was determined not to take him home until I knew for sure what was wrong with him.  I could see him dying, right before my eyes, he was giving up a little at a time.  My midwives contacted another doctor who specialized in pediatric gastroenterology, and she recommended we do a different test, a ph probe, to determine how bad his reflux was.  If it showed that it wasn't that bad, they would have to look for a different reason for his apnea.  They stopped giving him medication and did the test, which measured the ph level in his esophagus for 24 hours.  When the results came back, they said it scored over 800, which meant he was refluxing almost constantly.  They scheduled him for surgery the next day.  I was horrified.  I wanted to know why we couldn't wait for him to outgrow the reflux, like most babies do, and I was shocked to discover that he had no chance of living that long.  He would die of pneumonia, from all the stomach acid in his lungs, or get an infection from the stomach acid eating away his esophagus, or would simply reflux so badly one day that he couldn't get it back down in time.  We met the surgeon who would do the procedure, called a Nissen fundoplication, and I hated him.  He was so jolly and nonchalant, told me he did this kind of surgery "all the time."  I wanted to scream "but not on MY baby!"  He came in and patted Sam's head and told me everything would be fine.  I thought, "that's what they said after the ultrasound, too!"  I was so angry at him for being to pompous and self-assured.  I felt like he was tempting fate.  I knew he couldn't possibly be right all the time.

The day of the surgery, I was like a zombie.  I wasn't sure if the fact that I could see him dying was a premonition, because he wouldn't make it through the surgery, or if it was because of the reflux killing him little by little.  They let us go with him to just outside the surgery area.  He slept patiently on his crib, and I kissed him for the fiftieth time that morning, and held onto my husband as they took him away.  They gave him an epidural for the surgery, so that they would be sure he wouldn't feel anything and wouldn't have to rely on gas anesthesia to keep him unconscious.  Scott and I waited in a room for surgery parents.  It was the longest time of my life.

I felt so...well, I can't describe how I felt.  Finally the surgeon walked in, smiling, and I was so grateful to him for that.  As much of a jerk as he had been before, he knew that I would know my baby was fine the minute I saw him, if he was smiling.  I thanked him and thanked him, and we went to the recovery area, where they finally gave up trying to make me wait any longer and let me go sit with him.  He had all the usual wires I'd grown used to seeing, and there was a thin cut, stitched and covered with tape on his stomach.  Right above it was a plasic "button," that led to his stomach, and it had a tube coming out of it to release gas from his stomach, because he could no longer burp.  I kissed him gently, crying again without even realizing it.  I wanted to kill the surgeon.  It was totally irrational, but the mother tiger inside me could only think that he had taken my whole, beautiful baby from me and cut him, and hurt him, and I wanted to kill him.  The logical mother in me wanted to kiss him.  She was so grateful that he had known just what to do.  I was in shock, both from the stress of the day and the duality of my feelings.  I let the nurses convince me to go home "and rest," since I couldn't nurse him anyway.  They said he didn't need me there with him.  When I showed up the next morning, after getting about two hours of broken sleep, I was told he had cried all night.  I was so horrified, so mad at myself for letting them talk me out of following my guts.  They finally realized that he had the wrong tube in his button, and it wasn't letting enough gas out.  I felt guilty anyway.  I never left the hospital without him again.  They sent him home three days after his surgery, instead of the week they had predicted before the surgery.  He had already started gaining weight, and I could see him fighting again.  He wasn't dying anymore.
 

Sam is now a happy, healthy two year old.  He cannot vomit, and rarely burps.  They took his button out when he was about nine months old, and he has two little scars on his belly.  Right now he is playing with his big brother Tommy, and his little brother Ricky, whose birth stories are also here.   ~ Debbie (debbiemom)