By Shereen, Surrey BC Canada
PROM at 17 weeksDelivery at 31 weeks + 5 days.
Story added: 2007-07-25

If you are here searching these pages for hope and direction like I was many months ago let me pass on a little piece of wisdom that I recieved after I had Alexis and wish I had been given months sooner: If you choose to abort your baby you will grieve and if you choose to carry and the baby doesn't make it you will grieve but at least you won't spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been.
I think the best way to start our story is by sharing a blog entry that I wrote months ago;
April 15
Probably Time For An Update
Well it's been a while since I've blogged anything but I think I have a good excuse. We found out in late October that I'm pregnant. All was going pretty well with the baby until December when I started bleeding. Things settled down from that mid January but I had to remain on bedrest. In February we found out that my water had broken and that the baby could come at any time. None of the doctors thought we would make it past 23 weeks, we hit 28 this past Friday. At about 26 weeks she decided to attempt to make an apperiance that landed us at BC Womens for almost two weeks. There are no solid answers with the baby though, we've been told that even if we do make it to term that the baby may have a lung condition called Pulmonary Hypoplasia which is fatal. The doctors have given her a 50/50 shot at best. The waiting and wondering has been gut wrenching and we won't know if she has it until birth. We just all pray that she will be ok and continue to be the fighter that she has been so far.
We left out the part about our doctors pushing us to abort our little girl.
I didn't manage to stay at home much longer after that blog entry, I started to bleed again and spent the rest of my pregnancy going between 2 hospitals. The doctors at the first hospital just kept telling us the worst case scenario and I didn't want to hear it, I already knew she only had in reality a 40% chance of survival. In those later days I was often really guilty I wondered if I had made the right choice and if I was asking my fiance and 8 year old daughter to sacrifice to much. I would catch myself thinking that I just wanted the pregnancy to be done so we could know if she would be ok and deal with the future. Our little miracle was born May 9th at 3:20pm in Seattle Washington. We were airlifted out of Vancouver at about 1:30pm with the doctors still not being sure that I was in true labour; when we got to Seattle I was 8cm and Alexis was trying to make her way out bum first. She was delivered with an emergency C- section. We are so happy to say though that despite the terrible odds for survival and the even worse odds for a normal life that she was given that we have a beautiful and better yet very healthy baby girl! We finally made it back to Surrey on May 30th and Alexis was placed in the NICU there only a 2 minute drive from our house. We got her home on June 5th. Even now when we are waiting to see our pediatrician again because she might have CP I wouldn't change a thing. She brings us so much joy.