Maddux was born with gastroschisis. What that means in general terms is that his bowels, also known as intestines, or the long spaghetti looking guts, found a hole in his skin when he was still in the first trimester in the womb, and popped out of it. This exposed them to amniotic fluid, which wasn't terrible. During his first ultrasound at 20 weeks, the doctors found out and told us. I was terrified at first, but when I went home I did lots of research, saw lots of gory google images, and read quite a few momma blogs. These were the most helpful because they told me not only what to expect, but what to feel. My husband did some research too. He found that 1 in 20 babies of young mothers have gastroschisis, and that its got a 90% life rate. What I realized later on (through live experience with one of our hospital neighbors) is that the other 10% are usually gastroschisis plus a bunch of other problems babies. So in the end we realized that gastroschisis isn't something to be afraid of.
at about 24 weeks they did another ultrasound and found that I had almost no amniotic fluid. This is called Oligohydramnios (don't ask me how to pronounce that!). They measure your fluid on a scale of 1cm to 25cm, it can go higher, but 25 is pretty high. At 24 weeks I had 3cm of fluid, which is scary low. they checked to see if my water had broken, and it hadn't. So they had me come back 3 more times that week and finally just sent me to the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City. I live close by so this wasn't a problem. I ended up spending all of January 2011 in the hospital just waiting for my fluid to go back up. I had lots of support from family friends, people were praying for me and bringing me get well gifts and, in one case, pizza and a series of books. I got to know the staff really well and decided that I want to eventually work there.
When Maddux was born, he was breech, so I had a C-Section at 37 weeks. The doctors told me that they don't keep gastroschisis babies in for long past 37 weeks because it starts to become detrimental, but they never clearly explained why. Anyway I was happy to be done being pregnant 3 weeks early! When they pulled him out, he was unable to cry, which is normal in a C-section because there is all the fluid that wasn't squished out by the birth canal. What really sucked was that they didn't show him to me or let me hold him. They had to immediately put a bag around the bottom half of his body, to keep the bowels from drying out in regular air, and pass him through a window to the NICU. After that, Life Flight got him set up in a portable incubator. By the time he was ready to go, I was back in my hospital room waiting for the spinal to ware off. They brought him to my room but I still didn't get to hold him. All I got to do was touch his foot. The visit was really brief and then he was off to Primary Children's Hospital, which is in the same building, but a separate hospital. TWELVE HOURS LATER, when I could prove I could walk by myself again after the surgery, they let me go down and see my son. (see top picture above) During that twelve hours, the surgeons had done the first part of his surgery to get those bowels back in. They placed them in a plastic silo which would let gravity drop the organ back in his body. The surgeons also helped push them in every few hours. My son's bowels dropping in 12 hours was insanely fast. It usually takes a few days. We soon discovered that this would be his trend. for the next week it seemed like every time we went down to visit him, there was another cord or tube taken off of him. I should explain what I mean there, Maddux had all kinds of tubes on him after surgery. He had one tube going down his throat to his stomach to drain anything that went in there and stop it from trying to go down the bowels. When you have surgery on an organ, it shuts down for a few days after, so his bowels wouldn't work at all. They had another tube in his mouth that went to his lungs for breathing, they put a PICC line in his arm, basically its an IV that goes all the way from the arm to the heart and places nutrients straight in his blood. They had four monitors on him for heart rate and breathing rate. He had a catheter too. I think that was every thing. As of today, March 24th 2011, he has 4 monitors and the PICC line. The doctors are waiting for him to pass a proper poop before they start to feed him milk, which is very well stocked up at this point. We anticipate him coming home in about 2 weeks, if all goes well. There is no official go home time because its all based on Maddux, but he's been healing really really fast. We are very proud of our little man!
P.S. That last picture is my husband with our baby right after he was born. I forgot to adequately mention him...
