Birth Story

**This birth story was written as part of the healing process in therapy during the fall of 2018. I have decided to share it publicly as I believe it is an integral part in demonstrating how far Elliott has come and what has gotten him/us to the point where we are today**

**Caution: This post contains sensitive pictures**

Birth Trauma.

That looks different on everyone who has experienced it, but if I am being honest, being in the minority of it affecting less than 1% of pregnancies, I can’t say I could imagine, anticipate, or plan for what my birth story would look like.  

Elliott Paul Rabold was born on April 10, 2018 with less than 2% blood in his body. Medically diagnosed, I had a fetal-maternal hemorrhage.

My sweet baby was born via an emergency C-section on a Tuesday morning and came out looking whiter than a ghost.  He wasn’t breathing and he required some serious medical attention as fast as they could give it to him.  Let me back up though, and start from the beginning. 

I was 29 years old and pregnant with my first baby.  Nathan and I had been married for 6 years and decided we wanted to expand our family.  We were lucky.  I got pregnant within our first month of trying and I had a healthy and smooth pregnancy.  We were blessed and not one day went by where I didn’t take that for granted.

We decided that we didn’t want to learn the gender of the baby, so we enjoyed doing tests throughout the pregnancy to try and guess what the gender would be.  Our parents were over the moon, as this was the first grand baby on both sides of the family.  The baby was due on May 8^th. 

Life was good—I felt strong, we were mostly ready, we had just come home from a great babymoon, followed by the most epic baby shower and my 30^th birthday.  It was a busy, but wonderful, two weeks. 

On the evening of April 9, I received a phone call from my doctor, right before their office closed, with a voicemail asking for me to call back.  When I told Nathan that I had a voicemail from the doctor he asked if anything felt different or if I was stressed.  Without question I said everything felt fine and I didn’t know why they had called me.  For whatever reason, his question resonated with me.  I woke up throughout the night asking myself countless questions:

“Does anything feel different?”

“When I roll over, does that feel as it always has?”

“When is the last time I remember the baby moving”

“Wait, is everything ok?”

“Why would the doctor call me?”

I woke up early the next day after a restless night and right at 8am I had another call from the doctor.  Thoughts immediately flooded my mind.

“Whoa, they didn’t take long to call back? IS everything ok??”

The nurse on the other line simply and calmly told me that I had tested positive for Strep B and there is absolutely nothing to worry about. They will just need to administer antibiotics when I go into labor. 

“PHEW!“ I thought, “all that stressing for nothing……”

However, before I could think, I blurted out, “Hey! while I have you on the phone, I am not sure I can remember the last time I felt movement & something did feel a little different last night when I rolled over.”

To be honest, at this point I wasn’t even stressed. I had just spent the whole night restless and re-thinking every.little.thing. I figured it didn’t hurt asking the nurse while I had her on the phone.

The nurse’s response was wise, it was serious and it was quick.  Without skipping a beat, she told me I needed to start monitoring the movements.  It should be ten times, minimum, over the course of the next two hours.

At first, I was taken aback by how abrupt her response was.  I had casually asked only really hoping for reassurance from a licensed professional that I was probably just going nuts.  I got off the phone a little shell shocked, but decided to do what I would always do to feel the baby move.  I started moving my body and I started eating. 

I went on a walk with Nathan.  Nothing.  

I ate some breakfast.  Nothing.   

I started doing jumping jacks.  Nothing. 

I started pushing on my stomach.  Nothing. 

20 minutes had passed and I knew that I didn’t want to wait the full 2 hours, I felt like something was wrong. 

Let me stop right here and say something…. A women’s intuition is strong and it’s worth taking yourself seriously if you just have that ‘gut feeling.’  I will forever look back on THIS moment in my life and know that THIS is in large what ultimately ended up saving my son’s life.  I listened to the inner voice.  I didn’t know what I was listening to, but I listened to the feeling that said, “don’t wait 2 hours.” 

I called the doctor back and told her that I felt like something was wrong.  Again, her response shocked me.  She told me to come in immediately and asked how long it would be before I could get to the office.

I hung up the phone, sat on my kitchen counter and burst into tears. I was scared that I was right. I was scared something was, in fact, wrong.  Nathan tried to calm me down while simultaneously cancelling all of his morning meetings and putting everything on hold at work so that he could drive me to the doctor and be by my side. 

We left our house just after 9AM. Nathan tore out of our driveway like a bat out of hell.  I knew he was scared.  I was too.  I jokingly said,

“Hey! Either everything is going to be fine or we are going to have a baby today.”

We weren’t ready.  We wanted a baby, but not today. We sat in silence the rest of the 15 minutes to the doctor. 

At the doctor, they hooked me up to a monitor and quickly discovered a strong heartbeat.

Again, PHEW!  All is good.  We started making plans for that night….

Before we left, the nurse said they just wanted to check the baby’s movement and that would take about 20 minutes.  When she came back in, ten minutes later to check, it was a flat line on the monitor.  To be completely honest, in that moment, that still didn’t scare me, I just thought the baby was sleeping.  When she poked my stomach, the monitor spiked significantly and it wasn’t until I saw HOW much it spiked that I got that feeling that maybe something wasn’t right….

When the doctor came in and told me that she wanted to take an ultrasound to make sure everything was ok, Nathan and I looked at each other with concern. 

Five days prior I had an ultrasound that checked out perfectly.  It was the same tech performing the ultrasound on me, so she knew the baby had been all good less than a week ago…

She put the gel on my belly, the swoosh noise started and the normal excitement of an ultrasound very quickly disappeared.  The baby didn’t move.  The tech poked my stomach repetitively.  No movement. The silence in the room was deafening.

What felt like seconds later, my doctor was in the ultrasound room and she told me very matter of fact, while grabbing my hand,

“Hey momma, your baby is going to have a birthday today.”

The rush of emotions all becomes a blur.  I had thoughts of death, for both me and baby.  I had thoughts of being strong for my baby while also trying to shut out all of the negative emotions and fear.  I had thoughts of logistics as far as letting our parents know, getting our dog taken care of and finalizing some work projects I currently had going on.  I was asking myself what the hell was happening, and how did we get here, while also trying to stay present and comply with all of the madness happening around me. 

The bottom line is this.  We left our house at 9:05AM and the baby was born 11:10AM via an emergency C-section at 36 weeks pregnant.  

When we discovered our sweet baby was a boy, Nathan and I knew without question that we wanted to name him Elliott Paul. 

The minutes following his birth were some I will never forget, but some I also don’t like to remember.  The seconds felt like minutes and minutes felt like hours.  There was a helpless desperation Nathan and I felt and it was overwhelming.  The room was silent and all we could hear were the team of NICU doctors working on our little one.  I knew there should be crying and I knew there was something so very wrong.  I could see part of his little body and it didn’t seem real.  I had to be dreaming, right?  He was too limp, and he was too white and everything was too quiet.  We were praying harder than we have ever prayed before in our lives.  We both continually kept repeating over and over again outloud,

“Come on baby,” “you can do this” “breathe for me baby” “come on baby” “God please save him, please PLEASE save him.”

He was alive, but he was holding on by a thread.  His heart was beating, but it was beating with close to no blood. He had a stroke at birth and we didn’t know the extent of his condition.

As soon as the doctors got him stable enough, they whisked him out of the operating room and straight into the hospital NICU. There was so much happening that all I vividly remember is telling Nathan to go with him and my anesthesiologist asking if I wanted to go to sleep. I told him no. I was too scared that I would wake up with someone telling me my son had died and I couldn’t fathom that thought. I laid there alone-scared, crying and cold -waiting for them to finished my surgery.

Elliott immediately required multiple blood transfusions, an intubation, a transfer to a children’s hospital, a medical cooling blanket for three days and three weeks monitored around the clock in the Dell Children’s NICU (to name a few things). 

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Miraculously, three weeks after our little babe was born, we were discharged and able to take home a healthy and strong baby.  Yes, there are still some unknowns in our future that require countless doctors’ and follow-up appointments, but one thing I know for sure is this– my little Elliott is a miracle and warrior of a human who literally fought for his own life from the second he was born. 

You never know how strong you are until strong is your only option.

For a more detailed breakdown of the NICU journey, click HERE.