Christophers Story
 Christmas came, and we spent the entire day at the hospital with Christopher. My daughter, Ashley, who was almost 2 at the time, stayed in the waiting room with her grandparents. She was too young at the time to notice what was going on. I sat in the room with Christopher, thinking, wow what a lousy Christmas. Then he moved his little foot. I was so excited. I rubbed his foot, and he did it again. I called for the nurse, and asked if this meant he was going to be ok. She explained that they do jerk from reflex, and not to get my hopes too high. I didn't believe her. I knew he was waking up.
I continued to see him everyday. After a week, I had my doctors appointment to see how I was doing after the c-section and all. I get into the waiting area, signed in, sat down and waited for what seemed like forever. I looked around at all the people in the room. There were kids of all ages, couples who were expecting, and new mothers, who'd I'd seen for the last 9 months. These mothers, with their new babies. I started to cry, so that noone could see or hear. I was actually jealous of these mothers, for having their healthy babies with them, and my son was in a hospital, fighting for his life. My wait ended up being almost an hour. I got back into the room and the midwife examined me. I then explained how cruel of her it was to put me in that waiting room for so long after what had just happened to me. She apologized, but I know it wasn't her fault. We talked about how I was feeling and then..some answers to my questions. The ones that had been eating me for the past week.
She explained that the reason they could not find his heartbeat was because his was lower than mine, and the machine picks up the highest heart rate. He was in distress, due to abruptio placenta. (The premature separation of the placenta from the uterus.) They had to do an emergency c-section and get him out right away. The midwife saw on the ultrasound, that his heart was beating so slowly. His heartrate was about 40 at that point she said. By the time he was taken out of me, he was no longer alive. His apgars were 0 at 1 minute, 0 at 5 minutes, 0 at 10 minutes and then finally, only after intebating him, his apgar was 3 at 15 minutes. He was having seizures immediately after this and they put him into a phenobarbitol coma. She also told me I was very lucky to be alive myself. I'd lost a lot of blood and they asked my mom to donate, which she never ended up having to do. I asked her what did I do to cause this to happen. She said, it could have been from a number of things, or it would remain a mystery. She asked if I'd fallen, or been in an accident. I thought about it, and I had been in a small fender bender a few months before. She said that may be it. She then said it could also be because I smoked. Which of course layed on a lot of guilt. She said that I was to see the Ob/Gyn in one more week to have my stitches taken out and that was the last I talked to her.
I continued going to the hospital everyday. They did many tests on Christopher. CT Scan was one of them. I'm not good with medical terminology but they tried to explain that most of his brain was damaged by the lack of oxygen going to his brain. They called his "condition" hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. I will break that down. Hypoxia is an insufficient oxygen supply to the fetus. Encephalopathy is a general term describing brain dysfunction. Examples include seizures and head trauma. Basically this is an injury to the central nervous system caused by lack of oxygen during birth trauma. They also told me that he would be waking up from the coma eventually, but have to stay on phenobarbitol to control the seizures. At that point he was eating by NG-tube, but as he slowly woke up, he was eating, maybe 1/6th of an ounce every 3 hours from a bottle. This was getting him used to eating by mouth. The doctor didn't seem confident he would continue to eat by mouth. He said this was just a reflex and he would eventually lose that ability. He brought up inserting a G-tube, but I was against it.
About 2 weeks after he was born, he finally woke up fully. He'd been doing little things, like squirming around, moving his hand or his foot, for a couple days. But this day he decided to open his little eyes. Wow, the feeling of him being awake after all that time was undescribable. Tears poured. He could now come off the breathing machine and soon come home with me. First thing I did was ask to hold him. I hadn't been able to hold him until this point. The best feeling in the world was holding him, alive, awake, and off machines.
The last week he was in the hospital consisted of getting home care set up, learning how to give him his meds, and learning as much as I could about taking care of him. He was discharged from the hospital January 10, 1996. Which happened to be my daughters 2nd birthday. She didn't seem too impressed with her present(her little brother coming home), but didn't seem to care when we gave her her birthday cake. At home, I gave him his meds, gave him his feedings and seemed as though everything was going to be just fine. (noone really told me any different) After having him home for about a week, he started throwing up enormous ammounts of his feedings. At some points he would throw it all up. The home nurse wasn't satisfied with his weight gain (he'd actually lost some weight). He was throwing up his meds also.
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