Stories From the Delivery Room-Elijah's Story

“Push,” the doctor said gently, “You can do it. Give me a little bigger push.”

Pulling back on her legs and tucking her chin to her chest, my patient gave a little more effort to her last push and a tiny baby slipped into the doctors hands.

“It’s a girl,” the doctor announced with sadness in his voice.

The baby did not move or cry, or even breathe. The only evidence that she was alive was the beating of her miniscule heart, rhythmically pulsating beneath her thin chest wall.

The doctor gingerly placed the extremely premature baby into the warm blanket I was holding. There would be no rescuscitation of this infant, as she was too small, born much too early to have any chance of survival.

“Would you like to hold your baby?” I softly asked the sobbing mother and father. The mother, reaching her hands towards her baby, answering my question without words.

“Okay. Now, give me another push,” the doctor said calmly.

With tears streaming down her face and her baby cradled in her arms, she lifted her head off the bed, doing her best to curl over her abdomen and gave another push. The silence of the room was broken as she let out a grunting sound and then a cry of anguish.

Looking down between her legs, I saw another baby emerge into the doctor’s awaiting hands.

The frail baby was placed into the warmth of the awaiting blanket. It was a girl. She lay motionless in my hands. I brought her closer to the bright delivery light that pierced the dimness of the room and notice that there was the slight motion on the left side of her chest.

“She is alive also” I informed the parents, as I brought the baby to the mother’s chest. I carefully unwrapped the first baby and reunited the tiny infants, comforting them in the same blanket.

A little over 5 months before,these two baby girls were conceived by in-vitro fertilization. After failing to become pregnant with two prior rounds of IVF, the fertility specialist had convinced the parents to transfer four embryos. He and the couple were disappointed that the embryo quality was not optimal. None the less, the idea of transferring four embryos made my patient and her husband anxious, they only wanted to become pregnant with a single baby, or worse case scenario twins. The doctor informed the couple that he was not optimistic that any of the embryos would implant.

To the surprise of everyone, my patient did indeed become pregnant. But the first ultrasound brought heartache. The ultrasound showed one baby, then two…then a third baby. Three babies! This was completely unacceptable. This was not supposed to happen. The embryo quality had been poor. If they had known that they could possibly become pregnant with triplets, they would have never allowed four embryos to be transferred.

The couple went home devastated. There was no way that they wanted to have three babies. Yet, this pregnancy was so difficult to conceive in the first place, so abortion was out of the question.

For weeks and weeks they discussed what they could do. How could they handle this problem? The ultrasound showed that they were having two girls and a boy. Finally, around 17 weeks into the pregnancy they had come upon a solution that worked for them.

They would end the life of one of the girls.

Although fetal reduction is usually done at 9 to 13 weeks, the patient and her husband found a clinic that accepted them for reduction of the triplet. They desperately wanted to be parents, and they decided that a girl and a boy would be acceptable.

So, the termination was performed by injecting the baby’s heart with potassium chloride.

But, there was a major complication to the procedure. The doctor had accidentally terminated their boy and not their girl.

Over the next weeks the patient and her husband had come to terms with the thought of having two girls. They just wanted healthy babies.

The next crisis was soon to follow. Premature labor started and despite intensive efforts, my patient had delivered her two baby girls.

The babies lay silently in their mothers arms. Both parents were weeping over their lost babies, their lost dreams.

“Okay. One last push now.” The doctor encouraged.

The stillborn baby boy delivered. He was much smaller than his sisters and his little body had begun to deteriorate inside the womb.

Before the birth, I had given the patient options on how we could care for her baby boy. I could bring the baby to her chest right away to hold. Or the baby could be brought behind the partition temporarily and then I could take a moment to look over the baby. At that time I would return to them and describe the baby. If they were up to it they would see him, or I could take him from the room. The final option was for me to take the baby directly out of the room.

Now that the baby was born, I cradled him in my hands, covered by the blanket.

“Would you like to see your boy?” I asked.

“No,” the husband said quickly, “Take him from the room.”

Opening the door, I flagged down another nurse and asked her to stand by while I took the baby boy to a utility room.

Quickly returning to the patient’s bedside, I helped her create memories of her little girls. While she held them, I took footprints and slipped tiny handmade baby bracelets onto their delicate ankles. The parents held their babies together as I took family photographs. They kissed and cherished their baby girls.

About two hours later the baby’s heartbeats slowed and stopped. The girls had died.

After providing comfort to my patient and insuring she was stable, I went to the utility room to attend to the baby boy. It was important to me that he was treated with the same dignity as his sisters. Over the next twenty minutes I bathed him, powdered him and dressed him in a tiny handmade gown. His little feet made perfect prints with ink onto white paper. Pressing clay into a seashell, I prepared for an impression of his foot. Then I took his picture as he was cradled in my hand.

Returning to the patient’s bedside, I told she and her husband that I had cared for their son. They declined the mementos that I had made. The same mementos that were made for their baby girls earlier, in their presence.

This surprised and frankly saddened me. Some parents have a difficult time seeing their baby after death. But the parents had held their little girls for hours after they had died. I could not understand why they had rejected the baby boy’s mementos.

A couple of days later, I learned that my patient and her husband had chosen to bury their baby girls and give them a funeral. They had left the baby boy with pathology to be disposed of with the other specimens in the hospital.

It was the final straw for me. How could this baby, who had once been so cherished, be thrown away. How could he not be honored, recognized…loved?

It just broke my heart.

Ultimately, none of us will know what was in their mind...

My thought is this...if they acknowledged the child's life, they would have to face that they had a hand in his death.

That day I went home and asked Brian if he would agree to adopt a special baby boy.

We named him Elijah.

He is our son.