One Year ago

One Year ago we were anxiously anticipating Daniel's birth. On July 11th we had our first amniocentesis... Let's just say I couldn't sleep the night before. I had never had a long needle stuck in my belly before.
I thank God I had a doctor doing the amnio that had as much experience as year of my being alive. That morning he KNEW I was scared as all heck... and he seemed to try to make it better. He had to poke me twice because Daniel moved in the way.
I was not very happy later when we received the call that his lungs were nowhere near ready to be born. We had to hold off on our planned delivery for longer and there was no end point in sight. At that point I felt like I had totally failed.
Up until that point we were doing every thing that we could do medically in the hopes that we would try and prevent/lessen the chances that Daniel would not go in the same direction as his brother Jonathan.
Jonathan was born with severe lung immaturity that we didn't/couldn't see coming as he was born via c-section 2 days prior to his due date. He spent 55 days in the NICU and was VERY sick and nearly came to the point where we were told he needed ECMO.
We were not sure if this was a chance event or even why that would ever happen.
Not even our perinatal specialist was aware of why. So we decided to be watched more closely, be tested more often for Gestational Diabetes, have non stress tests or NST's. Be poked more times than necessary. All for Daniel. I got more ultrasounds of him at the end and I cherished the glimpses of him. He has a cute nose...


Daniel ultrasound @34 weeks

Everything had to be proven and I spent the entire pregnancy trying to say hey let's do xyz in the hope that we were doing that all in vain and for not. We were hoping that when we came to the amnio the results would've come back saying that he was fine and that we never had to worry about the lung thing again.

It totally sucks when you get vindicated and get told that we were correct in our worrying about this. Especially when it felt like I was doing ALL of the fighting with all of the docs in that practice. It was FUN though to see them eat crow and totally have to take their feet out of their mouths. Though we were terrified and sad.
Oddly enough the next two weeks were spent with either myself in the bed or on the couch
I was just in too much pain to do much of anything else and I was having contractions.
I could not be in more love with Daniel and I thank God His birthday was Super(future post).
Until next time.
Be blessed