Meeting Baby M ~ Bring It!

It was a Friday morning, the first snow of the season had begun falling around the hospital. I know this only because my sister has told me. I’d spent the night lying wakefully on the scratchy white sheets of my hospital bed, listening to the reassuring repetitive thump of my unborn child’s heart on the monitor. I didn’t look outside. My mind couldn’t wander for even one second from what I knew was coming…and even more, from what I didn’t know.

At 10:10 a.m., little M came into the world, six weeks premature but not a moment too soon. My cesarean revealed that the amniotic fluid inside my womb was gone. We could have already lost her, and by some accounts, we already should have. She blinked at me from across the room before they whisked her away.

Hours passed before I could finally be wheeled on my hospital bed to see my firstborn in the NICU. Her tiny 4 pound 9 ounce frame lay, completely exposed, on an open table…a transparent plastic pouch protruding from a hole in her abdomen. Inside the pouch, which was suspended above her, tied to the warming light attached to her bed, was all of her intestines…a purplish mass.

During her first surgery, before I even laid a hand on her, they had replaced her ovary and stomach into her tiny abdomen. But her abdominal cavity was so very small. It could not accommodate her large and small intestines, all of which had spilled outside of her body before she was even born. Because they had escaped through that little hole, just to the right of her belly button, and developed outside her body, her belly was never stretched by the growing organs as a healthy child’s would have been and was far smaller than it should have been. The pouch was inserted into the hole in her belly, to hold and protect the intestines. It hung above her, allowing gravity to move her guts into the abdomen as it grew and stretched.

There were tubes and wires. A nasogastric (ng) tube inserted through her mouth into her stomach to empty the stomach contents. The ng tube was taped to her face with a white sterile tape, covering parts of her cheeks and mouth. She had an IV in her left arm, which was splinted to keep her from knocking or pulling it out, a pulse-ox on her right arm, wires and patches attached to her chest to monitor her heart and breathing rates and patterns. She couldn’t wear a diaper due to the defect, her open wound. So she lay exposed…no swaddling, no blankets, no cute little outfits…on top of a diaper, just her little head covered with a tiny knit hat.

She clung to my finger. My heart tore. My empty arms ached.

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M was born with gastroschisis, an abdominal wall defect (a hole to the right of the umbilicus) that allows the intestines and other abdominal contents to protrude and develop outside the body. Each year as many as 1 in 2,000 babies are born with this life threatening birth defect. The incidence rate has skyrocketed from 1 in 10,000 when M was born. No one knows why gastroschisis occurs.


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