Sunday, August 16, 2015

Why?

Originally posted July 12, 2012
Last week I had to do what no parent ever wants to do, formally identify the body of our newborn son.  Welcome to our nightmare, here’s how we got there.

Regular readers will know that we were due a little boy in August, you will also know that this pregnancy hadn’t been plain sailing with a placenta previa and possible amniotic band causing stress and concern until we found out it had appeared to have no impact on our baby.

Nevertheless, we had been zipping along with no worries, our personal target of getting to the end of June was closing in and there was everything scheduled for a planned op on August 25th, everything was in place, there didn’t appear to be any reason for concern.

On the evening of Friday 29th, Jessica felt she was bleeding, as it was only slight and to be honest due to the previa sort of expected it wasn’t a massive concern.  We scooted down to the hospital and she was checked over, all seemed good and we were quickly discharged.  As we came out we noted a thunderstorm roughly near our home (we were 20 miles away), as we drove back we suddenly encountered massive winds, torrential rain, and a road sign or 2 flying past our car at head height!  Not much fun to be in the middle of that, we made it home safely and found out we had no power... with no A/C and temps still around the 85 mark it wasn’t a pleasant night.

In the morning Jessica checked the power company and found we had an estimated time of repair around midnight...facing all day with no A/C and temps going past 100 we booked a hotel.  Jessica then went to change as I grabbed all our items for her  & Ryan.  She then found that her blood loss was significantly more than the previous evening and we quickly decided to rush to the hospital again.

Our mutual relief when they connected Jessica up and found a heartbeat was immense, quickly admitted this time they set her up with IVs and also a steroid shot to help baby’s lungs develop.  At that time it seemed inevitable that baby would be coming out.  With ultrasounds being checked to see if they could determine a reason for the blood loss they slowly began to stabilize Jessica’s condition.  All through this baby was not stressed and still quite active.

This continued for the next few days, Jessica’s blood loss slowly dwindled & changed into fluid loss, baby remained ok with the exception of a brief episode on Tuesday morning when again treatment was given to settle everything down.  The intention was to get him to 34 weeks if possible and as Jessica was able to move from her bed, it appeared that was an achievable goal.

What we had hoped, expected & considered inevitable was that if his situation went into a distress mode, he’d be removed quickly without any debate.

Unfortunately, it seems that wasn’t the doctors plan. Our situation was drastically complicated by the fact that Jessica’s OB was in the same hospital at the time with a heart issue, so we had to deal with on-call doctors and rarely the same one on consecutive days.  I think that may have played some part in what happened.

Jessica was getting checked over every 4 hours, on Thursday at 6pm everything was good.  Ryan & I left at 8 with no concerns at all.  At the 10pm test, Jessica had spiked a temperature and baby was showing some distress with an elevated heart-rate. The doctor decided to give an IV shot as is standard protocol and then check everything again as normal in 4 hours.

Sometime between 10pm & 2am everything went wrong.  The test couldn’t find his pulse, which wasn’t necessarily unusual as he’d been transverse/breech which was uncomfortable for Jessica and made tracking him quite hard at times.  So they went off to the ultrasound and after a long time searching, could only conclude he’d gone.

I received a call at 4am and headed down to the hospital to get the bad news.  Quickly questions formed, this wasn’t supposed to happen, how had they let it get to this?  Jessica faced the rigors of surgery to remove him, it was quite an intense operation, and took a long time to complete.  Our son came out looking perfect, fat little cheeks, skinny arms & legs of course, but what should have been a reasonably healthy 4lbs 2oz.

We had some time with him, got to hold him and talk to him and wish things had turned out as they should have.

A quick word for the nurses who were wonderful, they were supportive, caring and understood all of our emotions, we can’t thank them enough.  The doctor who was on duty was devastated, I’m sure she’ll spend time analyzing our situation, maybe there’s something that could have been done differently, though it’s important to say that it appears all protocols were followed and the result just happened to turn out disastrously.  We did meet a  Dr friend of Dr Scott who was very helpful and will be dealing with the follow ups and discussing the autopsy results with us.

So, it’s hard because we did all we could, in hospital with an excellent NICU he’d more than likely have been in very safe hands had he been pulled out anytime in that week.  It just doesn’t seem fair at all.

I won’t speculate on the causes here, I think this breakdown of events is in-depth enough, but later on as more information comes our way, we’ll share it.  Maybe one day it could be vital to know for us, or someone else.

We named him Nathan Daniel Hunt, he will always be an important part of our family and is deeply missed.

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