My name is Tiffany and my son's name is Miles.  We live in Tucson, Arizona. I had my 20 week ultrasound and was diagnosed with placenta previa.  The doctor called me at home when he got the report and explained what that meant and said it wasn't a big deal now and hoped that it would move out of the way.  They did an ultrasound a month later and saw it hadn't moved out of the way.  He was still hopeful that it would move.  However, on Superbowl Sunday 2003, I was standing in my kitchen and felt like I had just peed a little.  I went to the bathroom and realized it was blood.  I went into the ER and they took me to labor and delivery.  They hooked my son Miles up to a monitor and did an exam and said that he was fine.  They kept me for 3 days for observation but then they sent me home and told me that I would have to be on partial bed rest until he was born.  After that, everything was pretty uneventful.  We still had one more ultrasound after that and saw that the placenta previa still hadn't moved so the plan was to schedule a c-section at 37 weeks.  I got 2 steroid shots for his lungs and that was it.

I woke up on March 19^th with a very heavy bleed so bad that I told my husband to call 911.  There were clots that were coming out and I couldn't even imagine that my son could be okay with that much blood loss..  Once I finally got to the hospital, they put Miles on a monitor to make sure his heartbeat was fine.  I had the joy of getting numerous IV pokes, a catheter, 8 blood samples drawn and a blood pressure cuff over 7 days.  They did an ultrasound to see how he was doing and they found blood flow in a spot that there shouldn’t have been blood.  For whatever reason, they just decided to let me rest and wanted to push me as far along as they could.  I was only 33 weeks pregnant then and that was too soon for him to be born.  After 4 more bleeds while I was in the hospital, they decided to do another ultrasound and this time it was a Doppler machine and they were able to actually see the blood flow in color and realized I had Vasa Previa.  As soon as they saw that, they scheduled my c-section for a few hours later.

I was scared to death of the c-section but it went quite well considering everything else that had happened.  They were talking about putting me under for the surgery because I was on the verge of needing a blood transfusion.  They agreed after some prodding from me to give me the epidural and let me be awake.  They said if I started bleeding too much, they would have to knock me out.  Thankfully that never happened and I got to listen to the doctors as they were getting him out and I got to hear him the first time he cried.  That was such a wonderful sound.  He was stuck in there though and they had a little bit of a difficult time getting him out.  That was kind of scary to listen to.  Miles was quite bruised because of it. 

While I was in recovery, the pediatrician came in to tell me that Miles started having some problems.  He was fine at first and spent 2 hours in the regular nursery, which was not what they expected because of him being a month and a half premature.  He started grunting and struggling to breathe so they had to take him to the NICU to give him a little help.  They put him on an oxygen hood and he was still struggling.  Five hours after my surgery, I was determined to get up and see him so they got me up for the first time in 5 days and wheeled me down so I could see him.  It was so hard to see him struggling so much.  I just wanted to hold him since I hadn’t held him yet but I couldn’t because he needed to stay under oxygen.  I was still a little groggy because they gave me morphine in recovery so it was really hard to understand what was going on.  He was just struggling too hard to breathe so they had to intubate and put a tube down his throat to help him breathe.  I missed that stage of his sickness because I was finally sleeping.  It turned out that he had a heart murmur and pulmonary hypertension.  His lungs had to be taught how to breathe correctly.  He was still breathing too hard on the ventilator so they had to move him to an oscillator and paralyze him because he was even trying to breathe over that machine.

Miles stayed on his breathing machines for 6 days and we still could not hold him.  All I could do was stay by his bedside and hope for the best.  They did tests on him every 2 hours so I was not allowed to touch him then because it was too much stimulation.  Finally on March 30 (Chris’ birthday), he came off his breathing machines and just had a little bit of oxygen.  Talk about your emotional day.  That was when I finally got to hold him for the first time.  I didn’t want to put him down but we were only allowed to have him out of his bed for 30 minutes at a time because he was under phototherapy for his jaundice.  I was just happy to have the chance to hold him a couple of times a day.  It was hard seeing him come off his morphine and all the other nasty stuff he was on.

On April 1^st he was done with his jaundice so he was able to move out of his bed warmer and to a regular “crib” and moved to a different spot in the room where the not so sick babies were.  That was when I knew that it was almost over.  He continued to do well but had to eat and gain weight before we could get out of there.  I was nursing him and then they had to feed him by tube.  They would check his tummy by pulling out what he had eaten with a tube to check it and then put it back in.  Once he finally started nursing well and eating out of a bottle he was able to have the tube taken out.  Then it was just a matter of gaining weight.  Well, he still wasn’t gaining weight but they knew he was doing okay so finally, they let us take him on April 7^th-2 weeks after he was born.  His heart murmur and pulmonary hypertension are all gone and he is now a perfectly happy and healthy little boy!

Hopefully that whole story wasn’t too hard on you.  Thankfully, you get to hear it after everything is said and done and you know that he’s fine.  The pictures are hard but I figured you would want to see how his life started.  He is now one month old and he is perfect!  I barely notice that I even had surgery because I was forced to be strong and move around before I probably should have.  I don’t ever want to see that hospital again expect for visits to the wonderful nurses and doctors that took care of him!  We feel so lucky that our son survived Vasa Previa and pray for those that have angels now due to the condition.  We knew nothing about it until after he was born.  Hopefully someday they will find a better way of finding it and hopefully eventually, preventing it.  My placenta was sent off for research and I have released my medical records to Georgetown University for them to do research as well.  Thank you for letting me share my story.

Chris and Tiffany