Sabina's birth story

 My husband and I had been married for 6 years when we thought we might try to have a baby. Really soon after this, in October 1996, I first found out we were going to have a little miracle by the end of June 1997. The pregnancy was not the ones you read about, I got ill in the 18th week and was hospitalized. Since that moment I started worrying about the little one I was carrying. The doctors told me there was nothing to be scared for, everything was going well, but the little voice inside me kept telling me different things. My own mother had lost two babies at birth and this was one of the things that worried me. Anyways, time went by and I past the critical moments of pregnancy and even began to feel more confident.

When I was 40 weeks pregnant, a lady in my Lamas class had a baby which died after only 3 days of life. It was a girl and she had heart and brain abnormalities. Then it struck me, I was almost sure this was going to be the same case with my baby. The ob-gyn I had at that time unfortunately was an incompetent one and she did not even bother to hear me out. She only suggested I went to the hospital every other day to have a CTG done, which I did. Those tests were not good from the beginning; the baby’s heartbeat was too slow and even that was taken lightly by that ob-gyn. And this went on for days, the nurses reacted concerned about the slow heartbeat and the ob-gyn did not even take a look.

After I had been having contractions for several days and nothing happened, on Saturday the 21st June I finally thought the time had come to embrace my little one. I had been having contractions for more than two hours every minute and we went to the hospital all exited and really hoping we would finally become parents. As soon as I was in the delivery room, the contractions stopped and nothing happened. The ob-gyn on duty was another one and he was a bit worried about the heartbeat and contractions coming and going. He told us to come back the next morning as early as possible to see what was happening. He made an ultrasound that morning (which had not been done for several weeks because the silly ob-gyn thought it was unnecessary) and discovered the baby was too big to be born naturally, there was no amniotic fluid anymore, she was lying in a breach position (bottom-first) and the placenta was just before the opening. So, in a few words, there was no way *Sabina could have been born in a natural way without serious complications for her and me. He decided to perform a caesarian as soon as possible.

And so our beautiful daughter was born on Monday June 23rd 1997 and we named her Sabina Marie José. Although everyone told me she was all right and perfectly healthy, I still had a strange feeling. I kept on telling them to take a look and asking if everything was really okay. The third day, I woke up and realized they had not brought her to me the whole night, in spite of my wish to see her and try to breastfeed her. They told me she had been sleeping the whole night and this worried me; I thought it was not normal for a newborn to sleep the entire night and to not get hungry. I began crying and a pediatrician came to take a look at Sabina just to calm me down. Unfortunately there was nothing to be calm about. She discovered Sabina had a heart rumor, she had seizures, she was looking yellow, and lots of other things were not okay. So they took her to the other ward. Soon we were transferred to another hospital, because this one was a small one with little research capacity.

In the academic hospital lots of tests were done, my little girl was put on IV and feedings were stopped, they administered anticonvulsants to her (Phenobarbital at first) and it was incredibly horrible to see her turned into a patient instead of a newborn. At this moment she was only sleeping and I had even the feeling I could not make contact with her due to the drugs they had given her. However, when we went to the Intensive Care Unit, she was crying and we were told she had been crying for some time. As soon as I talked to her and touched her, she stopped crying! That’s when I realized this little one had an enormous strong will and force to keep on fighting and that I was her mommy and she had chosen me to take care of her. And as I gently caressed her dark hair, I whispered "keep on fighting little one, I’ll make it up to you". And she did, she kept on fighting, she astonished every single one of us who had the fortune of being close to her.