Baby doctors have their schedules, but life doesn’t always abide by some official timetable.
And so months before Tamika Harris’ twin girls were due, she began feeling the pains of labor.
One of the daughters began pushing to leave Harris’ womb after just 22 weeks and hadn’t grown strong enough for the terrible adventure of birth.
So Harris was at Adventist Hinsdale Hospital, with the pressure and pain. She felt the first twin crowning and shouted for the nurse, who came to speak to her in the calm voice of nurses everywhere.
Harris knows that voice. She uses it herself, as a 911 dispatcher for the village of Burnham, talking over the phone to the desperate and the terrified.
“She said, ‘OK, we’re just going to put you back into the bed,'” Harris recalled. “I’m a dispatcher. And when people call frantically, you use that calm voice. And I realized she was doing that with me. I’m thinking, ‘No, she’s not doing that! This is an emergency!'”
The first twin wasn’t ready, but Harris and her fiance, Charles Hansbrough, were told she was coming anyway, and with little chance of survival.
Chazey Hansbrough weighed just a little more than a pound when she was born on Oct. 1, 2010.
“We knew that she wasn’t going to make it,” Harris said. “Here’s my baby that I’ve been wanting, waiting for, for I don’t know how long, and she’s not making it. She’s going to die. … So I cuddled her, I kissed her.”
Less than five minutes after the birth, her daughter was gone. But the parents had no time to grieve.
“I had to actually snap out of it very quickly and I had to realize that I have another baby inside of me, that I can’t be so upset, so emotional that I deliver her and she doesn’t make it,” Harris said.
Doctors expected the other twin, daughter Chelsey, to follow quickly. But she didn’t. Something kept Chelsey back, kept her inside her mother, kept her safe long enough for her lungs to grow and save her life.
Chelsey stayed inside the womb for eight more days. That gave doctors enough time to give her mom two injections of steroids to promote the lung development. Those extra days made the difference between life and death.
Chelsey was born on Oct. 9, at 23 weeks and three days gestation. Babies born that early have only an 18 percent chance of survival, according to the National Institutes of Health.
But Chelsey survived. At birth she weighed 15.5 ounces.
She was the size of her daddy’s fist.
“It was like it was preset, like God had said, ‘I’m going to keep your baby for eight days. I’m going to give you this shot for two days, and then we’re going to have her,'” said Charles, her dad.
Chelsey stayed at the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit for 100 days.
There were transfusions. There were monitors beeping. In a NICU, a baby’s hand is so tiny when strapped to one of those boards with all the tubes and the wires extending, the hand waving as if holding a sail.
And though I wasn’t there with them, I can see them, Tamika and Charles in the NICU at Hinsdale, and perhaps you can too.
See them huddled together, praying in front of the incubator, and other parents praying in front other incubators. There’s that hushed, heavy quiet in a NICU, and soft light, the doctors and nurses moving quietly like angels, the hearts of the parents and grandparents in their hands.
“You get more and more attached to her,” said Dr. Stavros Ionides, a longtime neonatologist at Adventist Hinsdale Hospital. “You don’t want to get your hopes too high. But then, as the weeks go by, you can let yourself get more excited. It’s an emotional investment. And it’s very exciting to have a baby like Chelsey survive.”
I really don’t have to imagine the NICU. I was there, with one of my own twins and Dr. Ionides, some 15 years ago.
Our boys were only a few weeks premature, but we’d almost lost my wife, Betty, during the birth, and one boy weighed only 4 pounds. He was losing weight rapidly and couldn’t hold anything down.
Ionides wanted to try a relatively new therapy back then, called kangaroo care, in the hopes of getting the boy to eat. Betty was far too weak, so before dawn they got a rocking chair and put my son on my chest, skin on skin, and covered us with a blanket. They told me to rock him.
So I rocked him for more than 24 hours, whispering and praying and bargaining with God, cradling the boy through the sunrise and then the sunset and the quiet of the night.
Hour after hour the monitors were blinking. Parents prayed for their children, some received good news, some not, and then the sun came up again.
Somehow, it worked. The little guy took less than a teaspoon of formula, but he kept it down.
Now he and his twin brother are high school freshmen, soccer players, 6-footers both, all sinew and muscle and Adam’s apples and chin stubble, the two of them wolfing down food like a dozen lumberjacks.
That kangaroo treatment was also used with Chelsey. Her parents rocked her the same way and it helped her, too, and now she’s home with her mom and dad.
I figure most parents who’ve been alone in the night with those monitors beeping can understand. You hold your infant, you feel their breath on your skin, and reason alone can’t begin to explain it.
Reason and science helped, but they can’t tell us what held Chelsey back and kept her in the womb those extra days so she might live.
“We call her the miracle baby,” said her dad. “And she made it successfully, by the grace of God.”
Amen.
