Ella Rose

August 30th, our due date. We were scheduled to be induced the following day and thought our biggest surprise would be GIRL or BOY?! However, it wasn’t the start we had hoped for. After days of labor, our baby made their entrance into the world at 4:06 a.m. on September 2, 2023. Unbeknownst to us, we had a baby girl that would fight like heck to stay with us.  

During delivery, the nurse lost her pulse, and the team of doctors and nurses rushed in to perform an emergency episiotomy. After cutting her out, they immediately moved her to a nearby table to perform CPR. Minutes passed before they administered an EpiPen, and what felt like hours later, Ella Rose finally started to breathe, and a pulse was detected. 

The team rushed her to the onsite NICU to place her on a breathing tube and monitor her with multiple wires due to seizure activity they observed. As they transported her, our nurse came back to tell us that we had a beautiful baby girl who had begun to breathe. 

Ella Rose was quickly airlifted to the NICU at Levine Children’s Hospital where she spent 72 hours on a cooling blanket, a newer technology set to lower her body temperature to help slow her nervous system and limit any brain damage caused by the lack of oxygen. It was there she was diagnosed with Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE). Over the next several weeks, she underwent numerous diagnostics, including MRIs, CT scans, ultrasounds, and EEGs to name a few. During this time, she also began the slow process of learning to breathe on her own and, eventually, eat without a tube.

It wasn’t until the late evening on day 5 of our NICU stay, that we were FINALLY able to hold our girl!  Although she was still connected to so many cords, and the breathing tube had been removed, our sweet girl was finally in our arms. Meghan, the mother, had been pumping during this time, and the little breast milk she could produce was being fed to Ella Rose through a feeding tube. On the seventh day, Ella Rose learned to breastfeed, and the bond between mother and daughter grew stronger. That moment began a journey that would last 19 months! 

Throughout her time at Levines, Ella Rose captured everyone’s heart. Many of the staff would come by just to check on her progress. They could not believe this was indeed the same baby that many of them had seen on intake. There were tears, laughter, and so much uncertainty but most of all, we felt incredibly blessed by the care and compassion of the team.

On September 16, 2023, Dr. Ruiz told us the news we had been waiting for: Today’s the day you go home! We were overwhelmed with a mix of excitement and fear, but mostly gratitude. Since then, Ella Rose has continued to thrive. She has follow-up appointments with Neurology and the Neonatal Clinic every couple of months until she turns 5. She also participates in weekly physical therapy to ensure she stays on track with her milestones.

As first-time parents there were already so many unknowns even without the birth trauma and each day in the NICU felt like two steps forward, one giant step back as her care team worked endlessly to ensure our Ella Rose was getting the best possible care. We changed our first diapers there, we sat numb for hours on end just watching her monitors, we found moments to laugh through the tears, the nurses’ hands mirrored our hands as we held our baby for the first time, they held the wires and ensured us it was ok to hold her, breast feed her, bottle feed her. We became parents in a place of so much unknown and felt as though we lost so much time, so many “firsts” but, the NICU is part of our story and we wouldn’t have our girl without it. I am sure we should have had a million questions, but you don’t know what to ask except “is she going to be ok?”, “Why did this happen?”,  “Could this happen again?” and honestly we don’t have those answers and that is scary, and at every appointment we still hear “WOW, this is not a typically HIE baby, she looks great!” however, it’s always followed by the daunting “BUT, we will need to keep an eye on her milestones and her learning behaviors between the ages of 2-5 years old.” It is not easy to hear, BUT we have our NICU girl, we are NICU parents, and we will forever be grateful for the miracle that happened in that space.