this little girl...

Some people know Bella’s story and some people don’t, after this weekend I don’t think there is a better time to introduce everyone to my little miracle baby.

On November 7^th 2008 James and I enjoyed a date night out while James’s parent’s had Lexi for the night I was just over 34 weeks pregnant with Bella (we knew we were having a little girl). At the theatre I kinda noticed Bella hadn’t been moving whole bunch, even after a whole bag of fuzzy peaches it didn’t put her in the tailspin it usually did, but I thought maybe she was just tired. The next day we went and picked Lexi up from grandma and grandpa’s house, ran a bunch of errands and finished all our Christmas shopping. In the back of my head I kept thinking that I hadn’t felt her move much, but kept putting it off as we had been busy so I probably missed it. We went home and Lexi and I snuggled into our routine of an afternoon nap in my bed, for the last few months these hadn’t been as good as they had been because anytime Lexi was even close to me Bella would go crazy spinning and turning in my belly, but that afternoon I slept for 3 hours with no movement from Bella, even Lexi noticed she couldn’t get Bella to move when she touched my stomach. I got up from my nap ate a bunch of Halloween candy trying to get her to move and it just wouldn’t work, so I went off to labor and delivery for a stress test, fully expecting to be sent home in a couple hours after being told I was over reacting.

My baby girl Isabella Jaymes was born on November 8th, 2008 at 34 weeks, weighing in at 6lbs 3oz's by emergency c-section due to lack of fetal movement.

When she came out I thought she was wrapped in a blanket because all I could see was white. Turns out that was her and she was white because she had basically no blood in her system. (her hemoglobin was 2units) She had suffered a fetal maternal hemorrhage. To this day we don't know why this happened, generally this happens when there is a trauma to the placenta and it ruptures, my placenta was healthy and still attached but for some reason instead of taking out the bad dirty blood and putting in new clean blood it just took out all of her blood. Even 24 hours later I had a high concentration of her blood in my body.

As soon as she was born they began a blood transfusion that took hours they had to take out 10mls of the toxic fluid that had gone into her body and then push in 10mls of blood so that they didn't overwhelm her system. After 5 hours they had her stable enough to fly to Calgary to Foothills hospital, but there was little hope she was going to come back.

In Calgary all they really kept telling us was that Bella was very sick, they put her on a cooling blanket to try and slow all the damage that was happening to her organs and brain from the toxins. Her lungs weren't working on a regular ventilator because she had retained so much fluid (she was now weighing over 8lbs just a few hours after birth) so she was put on an oscillating ventilator to shake her body and move the fluid around so she could breath. All the tests were coming back bad, her kidney's weren't working, her EEG's were both pretty much flat line, and things were just bad.

She came off the cooling blanket 3 days later and by a miracle she started to get better, kidney's started to work and she started to pee out all the excess fluid and returned to her 6lbs. Her next EEG came back in normal limits. She had a few MRI's done that do show brain damage in her basil ganglia but we are still unsure of what effect this has on her.

On November 15th she came off the ventilator and we were able to hold our baby girl for the first time. A few days later they started to try and feed her and she had a great suck reflex much to everyone's surprise. I was never able to breastfeed her as they had to monitor very closely how much food she was eating and by the time she got home it just never really worked for us.

On November 22nd she got to come home to Medicine Hat NICU for one more week of monitoring, she was still having some tummy issues that we needed to work through, she wasn't given a full feed until she was 19 days old so it took a bit for her stomach to get working as she had just been on iv for so long.

Bella has seen a lot of specialists in her little life, but we slowing checked them all off the lists, she was seeing a cardiologist because she has a leak in one of the ventricles of her heart, but by 3 months had sealed itself up, we were seeing a neurologist, who at 3 months wanted to diagnose Bella with cerebral palsy because of her increase muscle tone and she told us Bella ever crawling or walking was very unlikely and would be very delayed if she ever did and it would take a lot of physical therapy. Well Bella is a mover, she did everything pretty much by her milestones and continues to impress us all. Her amazing pediatrician wouldn't allow for the CP diagnosis and I am glad she didn't. We have had an amazing support team throughout all of this.

We have been very blessed as Bella has remained a healthy little girl, she has never been on a prescription since leaving the hospital, we only see our doctor at yearly check up. Bella has had speech delays since she was young, we thought that if this was our only hurdle with her we were doing good. (Bella does wear glasses and has since she was 10 months old, but it is a genetic eye problem, and she does well wearing her glasses)

But in the recent weeks we have found out that she is going to need hearing aide. I will tell you I didn’t take this well at first, I was upset and cried my tears, but after a good stern talking to from my Mom I know this is something else Bella can over come. We just spent Friday at the children’s hospital in Calgary seeing an audiologist there who was amazing with Bella. Because there is no hearing loss in either of our families our guess it that her problems are from being on the ventilators and the kidney problems she suffered from when she was first born, ( I understand the ventilators causing hearing problems , but the kidney stuff confuses me, but the doctors would know what they are talking about) So in the next few weeks she will be fitted with her hearing aides and I look forward to see how her speech and comprehension will come with her being able to hear the world around her.

Bella is our world, she drives us crazy (the doctor who delivered her says she has a big purpose in this world for everything she fought for to make it, and I am pretty sure it is to push me over the crazy edge!) you will hear James and I refer to her as the evil one quite often (ok she probably isn't totally evil, but she is a little) But I couldn't imagine life without her and we were very close to living that life. Her smiling face every morning when she wakes up is a reason to get up in the morning, the smile when I pick her up from school and she tells me how much fun she is having, her determination to do EVERYTHING on her own scares me to death, but I wouldn't have it any other way with this little girl!