Good Pre-Natal Care: First Line of Premature Birth Prevention

Temporarily staying at their place, I left my daughter not feeling on top form around 11:00 a.m. for work. She was 35 weeks pregnant and the pain in her legs and lower back refused to go away.

In fact, only a couple weeks or less prior, I had noticed that her neck had darkened, looking a sickly black-blue. It reminded me of when I was pregnant with my first child 28 years ago and a similar colouring overtook my neck. I mentioned the darkening of her neck and how similar to mine it looked.

I did not mention my anxiety.

Less than three months before, I was in Jamaica with every intention of staying there. My daughter and my relationship was again on rocky ground  – ever since November 2013 when I refused to allow my mother to suck me back into her well of darkness and devour me with her self-centred, money-grabbing ways.

Source always beckons or rouse me out of my sleep around 3:30 in the morning. As I turned in the queen-sized bed in my mentor’s guest room in Kingston, Jamaica, an image flashed across my mind.


It was my daughter and she was pregnant. 

Not able to go back to sleep, I messaged a mutual friend to ask whether she knew if Abi was pregnant. Her almost immediate response to me was, “How did you know?” After telling her that it came to me in the early morning, she told me that she had heard rumours of the pregnancy.

A couple or so weeks later my daughter sent me an image via Facebook messenger. It was an ultrasound picture of my granddaughter.  In that moment, I knew I would be returning to Canada. There was no question. It was just a matter of when and for how long but the early news from Source was my cue to come back to Edmonton.

On June 30, 2014 as I said goodbye and told my daughter to call me if she felt worse, Source again whispered to me. I was not sure what was being said but felt a need to be ready for move quickly. So when my daughter called at 4:00 p.m. to say that she still was not feeling good even after doing what I told her at lunchtime, I knew we had to get to the hospital.

The child’s father was out of town on business and, as I did not want her to drive to the hospital where I would meet her, I left work early and picked her up. As we sat in the triage area, a knowing came over me. Her neck had darkened more and the pain in her legs and back was now as debilitating as it was back in 2003 when she was diagnosed with sickle cell anemia.

Hours later, a young doctor came in and checked the chart, the baby’s heart rate and in ten minutes was about to discharge my daughter with a prescription for painkillers.

My daughter has big eyes – and they are as communicative as mine. She turned them on me and I could see the fear and question, “What do you think, Mommy?” She did not have to ask twice. I was piercing into that intern with my own gaze, slashing him with caustic words, dismissing his diagnosis as the same misdiagnosis that was done over a decade ago. “That is unacceptable,” I said.

After I detailed:

• my daughter’s journey with sickle cell
• my own journey as the carrier of the trait and one whose iron level has been officially diagnosed as abnormal
• the similarities in her physical presentation as mine when I lost my first child, and 
• the fact that the well-known Edmonton-based obstetrician had not properly managed my daughter’s pre-natal care (in my expert opinion) – no folic acid, no iron supplements, no monitoring of her sickle cells, no amniocentesis  and absolutely no testing to see whether the baby was thriving in the tummy of a woman whose pre-existing condition made her extremely high risk 

the poor intern ran out and called a top level obstetrician-surgeon. That was around 11:00 p.m., five hours or more since we were at the hospital. By midnight, the decision was made to remove the baby by C-section.

Mahalia Fausu was born at 1:39 a.m. on July 1, 2014 – Canada Day – weighing 4lbs 1 ounce.

Her parents were worried but I was not overly. There was a team of prayer warriors ministering to her – my Sistahs of DOS, her grandfather and his family in Jamaica, my 2,000+ followers on Twitter and friends of my daughter all over Edmonton and the world.

Through this journey, I realised why my first child died. My mother had also lost a child – who knows whether the medical issues were exactly the same. Mahalia broke a cycle of child-death in our family.

It is #WorldPrematurity Day and it holds special meaning for us. I am sure my daughter will proudly and gratefully attend the Royal Alexander and the Grey Nun’s Hospitals each year, as she did today, to pay respect to the teams that worked tirelessly to prevent the grief and devastation that would have overtaken her had things gone differently on June 30.

Do you or anyone you know have a child that made its entrance into our world prematurely?  Share your story with us here or on our Facebook page.

Do enjoy the rest of the evening. 

Pregnancy, Prenatal Care and Parenting - The Test of Mettle

Claudette Esterine

On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant catastrophe occurred. Although we were living only 100 kilometres away, in Kiev, we only had official confirmation about two weeks after the incident.  

Fellow students, who were in medical school and interns in various hospitals across Kiev, reported seeing badly burned people being quietly whisked into their facilities. The minimal access some had to international media broadcasts were either totally blacked out or could only be heard sporadically. The news was too big, however, and too many students were travelling outside of the country for information of the disaster to be kept on the “down low,” for much longer.

I was pregnant with my first child and was one of the first to get out of the country. Months later, when my child – a boy – was born, dead, a still birth, I blamed the Soviet Government for my loss. The stress of being in the country for months after the accident and eating and drinking polluted food and water, if not the actual effects of the nuclear substances (??) that wafted across Kiev, were thought to be in some measure responsible for my loss.

Twenty eight years later, I am wondering how true that really was as I sat in the waiting room of the Royal Alexandria Hospital in Edmonton, Canada.

On July 1, 2014 at 1:40 in the morning, my first grandchild, a girl, was born. Her arrival was unexpected by the medical professionals but something told me she was going to get here earlier than her August 4 due date. When my daughter sent me the picture from her first ultrasound I was still in Jamaica on an extended visit. After offering congratulations and the usual questions such as when, what the sex, etc., I remarked to her “Your baby is going to get here by mid-July." I just knew.

Returning to Canada in April was not my first choice. I really wanted to remain in Jamaica, the land of my birth, but the actualities on the ground were not what I had hoped they would be and something was telling me it was time to leave. News of a grandchild determined where my destination in Canada would be.

Abigail

Looking at my daughter, doing my own assessment of her pregnancy and her physical movement, I repeated to her, possibly more often than she cared to hear, that the baby was going to be here early. Approaching the end of June, I noticed bodily changes in her that took me straight back to Kiev, 1986. They also took me back to October 1987 - when she was born and I was experiencing exactly what she was.

That was when it slowly dawned on me that the stillbirth of my first child was not necessarily due to the Chernobyl accident but my own health deficiencies and the poor medical care that I was receiving as a severely anemic woman. My daughter is too.

On June 30, Abi, my daughter called me at work around 5:00 p.m. to say she was still feeling poorly and suffering severe leg and lower back pain. Without a second thought I told her to get dressed, we are going to the hospital. We arrived around 6:00 p.m. and an Intern examined her around 8:30. His diagnosis was that back pain was “a regular occurrence in pregnant women" and he was going to send her home with some Tylenol!

Those who know me, and my daughter does, know that I can and will become dangerously annoyed when my loved ones are threatened. My looks will kill when my intelligence is questioned. The Intern found out as well.

After schooling him on the shared condition between my daughter and I; how it presents itself and what her medical professional since the pregnancy has not done, he ordered a battery of tests and requested a specialist, senior obstetrician/surgeon consult.

Said Senior Doctor confirmed what my Spirit was telling me and what Mahalia, my Kitten and granddaughter, was desperately trying to communicate all day. It was time to get her out.

Mahalia on the NICU a week ago

Slumped on the floor outside of the Operating Room, weeping after seeing my granddaughter – all 4lbs 1 ounce of her for the first time – all I wanted was to go see my daughter in recovery. She was wheeled out almost an hour later and her first words to me were “Did you see the baby?”

This morning as I changed her diaper as she fussed (she hates being changed), my heart sang. The cycle has broken.

Death is not something I fear. Not anymore. The death of my first child and the many transitions that I have had the honour of being present for in two hospitals in Alberta have taught me that this is a circle – the circle of Life.

Mahalia at almost two weeks old

She is not completely out of the woods but our Mahalia is a fighter, surpassing every target set for her as a preemie and was released from the hospital one week and a day after her birth. The prayers but more the Love that has encircled her has been more than I could have imagined. Mahalia has brought healing to many relationships in my and her mother’s life.

Funny side story: My daughter did not know about her baby’s namesake – Mahalia Jackson – when she chose the name. When I told her she said, “Well you will have to teach her about her!”I most certainly will tell her about the Queen of Gospel but also that her name means “tenderness,” and that is what she is – tender and precious.

Do you have a story to share about your child’s or grandchild’s birth? We want to hear so leave a comment here or visit our Facebook page and share it with us.

Namaste