Our Story – Part 3: The Accidental Home Birth

“Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest and let the spirits fly in and out.” – Rumi 

At about 2:00am on January 19th, 2016 my wife gently woke me up and said: “I think it’s time.” Even though we’d only gone to bed three hours earlier, I was suddenly wide awake and full of energy. We were about to have a baby. (She was going to have the baby, I was going to cheerlead from a safe distance. But we’re a team.)

We timed her contractions and they were about 6-8 minutes apart, with tiny contractions in between. The hospital told us not to even bother coming in until the contractions were closer to 3 minutes apart. So we got up and did a little pacing in our courtyard, breathing and trying to map out the day ahead.

This wasn’t our first rodeo. When our first kid was born it was about a 12 hour process from “It’s time” to “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” (Or Dashiell rather.) We figured we still had plenty of time to get dressed, make sure everything was in our “Go bag”, make a few phone calls to let everyone know what was up, and get to the hospital. 

We were wrong.

So, so wrong.

After an hour of pacing in the courtyard Karyn wanted to lie down for minute. We headed back inside and she reclined on the couch while I started writing emails to work telling them that I wasn’t going to make in that day, or the rest of the week for that matter. 

Karyn got up to go to the bathroom.

So there I was, feet up, still in my pjs, typing away when Karyn called from the bathroom in a very urgent tone. 

“Michael! She’s coming!”

I was confused. Who? Who’s coming? It’s 4 o’clock in the morning and we aren’t expecting any visit-OH MY GOD!

I leapt up and bolted into the bathroom.

“She’s coming! We need to go NOW!”

It was a scene straight out of a clichéd sitcom; Karyn quickly waddled to the door as I tripped over myself trying to kick off my pajamas and put on some pants. Where was the go bag? Where were the keys? My shoes! Who moved my shoes?!

Luckily, my parents had graciously come to stay with us, so I didn’t need to worry about taking care of Dashiell. My mom heard the commotion and got up to help me get my head on straight.

Karyn got to the front door and froze, one hand on the door knob, the other between her legs.

“She’s here. I can feel her head.”

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Three months earlier I was hunched over my computer, late at night, Googling “esophageal atresia” and, somewhat ironically, finding it difficult to swallow. 

In a nutshell, esophageal atresia is a birth defect where the baby’s esophagus doesn’t fully develop. There’s a bit at top where it attaches to the throat, and there’s a bit at the bottom where it attaches to the stomach, but there’s nothing in the middle to connect them. It is not a common defect, but something that can happen when Trisomy 21 is also present.

And according to Karyn’s doctor, after her latest ultrasound, our baby had one. She would almost certainly require surgery to connect the two bits of her esophagus as soon as she was born. 

By this point in the pregnancy we had reached out to some Down syndrome groups in our area and were blessed to find Club 21 in Pasadena. If you live in Southern California and you have someone with Ds in your life you need to get hooked up with Club 21. Seriously, they’re the greatest.

Through them we were put in touch with a mother whose daughter had a similar issue and had already gone through surgery. She painted a picture for us as to what we could expect from the surgery, the recovery and potential follow up procedures. As with any surgery involving a baby, it’s not a picture you want to look at for very long.

You never want your children to have to experience anything remotely associated with a hospital, but there is cold comfort knowing that you are not the first person to have to go through something. We were so grateful that this total stranger would talk to us and share her story. And while we struggled to wrap our heads around surgery being performed on our baby girl, we felt that she was in the best hands in the city. (I didn’t know how were ever going to be able to pay all the medical bills, but that was a worry for another day.)

We met with doctors and pediatric surgeons. We created a plan. There would be a team that would meet us in the delivery room, and as soon as she was born they would whisk her away to assess whether or not they needed to cut her open to make her whole again. 

We were also told that there was a chance the baby might be born prematurely, so Karyn needed to start going in for weekly wellness checks. We were coming up on Christmas, and while we had friends to help with Dashiell when the baby finally arrived, no one was available during the week around the holidays. We called my parents, who were only too happy to help, and they flew out to spend the holidays with us, and be there for Dashiell should the baby arrive early.

It seemed like everything was falling into place. We were as ready as ready could be. We had a plan, we had backup, and now we just needed to have a baby. But as with everything we’ve experienced during this journey, we had to let go of our expectations and embrace the reality that presented itself. Because at no point during the planning was there ever talk of Karyn giving birth, unaided, on our very un-hospital-like living room floor.

And yet, here we were.

I was on the phone with a 911 operator. Karyn was on her hands and knees desperately trying not to push as the contractions crashed down over her. (We realized later that maybe we should have been paying attention to those tiny contractions in between the big ones.) And my Mother, God bless her, was at the business end of my wife, following the relayed directions of the 911 operator. 

The call lasted eight whole minutes. The baby was out before the paramedics arrived. My Mother caught her and wrapped her in a towel. She was pink and wrinkly and crying, and from the looks of her, perfectly healthy. The baby that is. My Mother, while also pink and slightly wrinkly was in total awe of the moment.

As Karyn sat on the floor, holding our new baby girl, four burly fireman crammed into our tiny apartment to check her and the baby out. I cut the umbilical cord. And the next thing you know we’re in the back of an ambulance, speeding toward a hospital.

“What hospital?”

“Kaiser Permenante.”

“We can’t take you there.”

“What? It’s just down the street. It’s part of our plan.”

“Sorry. No can do.”

And so we watched as we drove right past our hospital to be admitted to the hospital directly across the street from it. If Karyn wasn’t strapped to a gurney we could have just walked over on our own.

No teams would be called. No doctors assembled. We were wheeled into a busy ER, and everyone involved was given a thorough going over. 

And everything was just fine. Other than Down syndrome our daughter was perfectly healthy. The esophageal atresia either wasn’t there to begin with, or had patched itself up since the last ultrasound. (We’ve still never gotten a very good answer about this.)

And for all our fretting and fussing, sleepless nights and anxiety ridden days since the diagnosis, we now had a baby in our arms instead of our imaginations. She was beautiful. And we were starting to realize that maybe she wasn’t so scary after all.

We named her Rumi, after the Sufi poet whose words had brought us inspiration and comfort during the pregnancy. 

And so began our journey with this thing called Down syndrome. We’re three years in now, but we still have so much to learn. We’re taking each day as it comes, and trying to see the adventure in all of it.

Thanks for coming along me on this little trip down memory lane. I can’t promise that the stories from here on out will be as exciting, but I will endeavor to make them entertaining.

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Epilogue:

As we were getting settled in our hospital room later that morning (a room that was a far cry from the “Birthing Suite” we’d toured 6 months earlier at Kaiser) my phone rang. It was Karyn’s doctor’s office calling. They’d noticed something from the diagnostics of her wellness check the day before and wanted her to come back in as soon as possible. They wanted to make sure the baby was doing ok. I told them that if they could get to a window, I’d hold the baby up so they could see that she was doing just fine.

We tried to get transferred over to Kaiser, but we were informed that they didn’t transfer a patient to another hospital unless is was a medical necessity. We took this as a sign that everything was a-ok.

What wasn’t a-ok was trying to get all the paperwork transferred between hospitals. I won’t bore you with the details, but it did involve hackers holding medical records for ransom.

Never a dull moment. 😉