Story 1: The story of finding out.
December 15, 2001. It was a snowy Saturday morning and Jason and I had gotten a sitter and ventured out early to go help clean the church. As we drove along Jason turned to me and said, "I hate to bring this up (he hated to because he knew I'd be instantly crazed and obsessed with knowing for sure) but I'm pretty sure you're pregnant."
In fact, he'd "known" for a couple of weeks but had refrained from saying anything for the sake of my sanity. I was totally shocked! He had never before (and he's never since) had any kind of premonition about our babies. As we talked about it throughout the day, he told me that not only was he 90% positive that I was preg, but he knew the sex of the baby and what it's name would be. He wouldn't tell me because he wanted to see what I felt like it was, but little did he know, the name thing completely gave it away. I had known since before we were married that his favorite girl name was Jessica and that he wanted to name one of his daughters that. We hadn't given our first girl the name, but I already had it pretty set in my head that the next girl would be Jessica.
I managed to wait to whole days to take a pregnancy test, and of course he was right on all counts.
Story 2: The birth story.
We finally went in to be induced when Jessica was 6 days overdue. Before starting pitocin and such, they like to get a baseline on contractions and the baby's heart rate, and that's where we hit a snag. Jessie's heartbeat was all over the place. We spent a good 4 hours before they even started the induction while the nurses consulted our midwife, the midwife consulted the OB, and they both consulted the pediatrician, puzzling over what could be going on with our little girl's heart. I came very close to getting a c-section because they were worried about how the baby would handle labor. I found out after the fact that I was lucky I didn't know just how worried everyone was. Jason, unfortunately, did know. In the end they decided to just get the baby out as fast as possible, so they broke my water, pushed out as much of the water as they could, and got going on some serious pitocin. My labor only lasted 4 hours, by far the shortest of all my babies. We were incredibly relieved when Jess was born, big and pink and crying hard before she was even all the way out.
Even though she looked great and seemed fine, they kept checking her heart and it was still doing funny things. She came home from the hospital with a heart monitor on, and when she was 3 days old she got an echo-cardiogram (an hour long ultrasound of her heart.) The echo was quite the experience. I was absolutely exhausted and wanted so bad to put my head on Jason's shoulder and go to sleep as we sat in the dark room watching the monitor, but I felt like that would make me a terrible mother. The ultrasound tech also unwittingly freaked us out. He was pointing out what the colors on the image meant-- blood flowing in and out, etc.-- and kept saying things that made it sound like he was seeing some major problems. A few days later we found out the results of the echo were completely normal. She got a chest x-ray that day too.
The results of the echo and the heart monitor were sent to a pediatric cardiologist at Primary Children's. The cardiologist was worried enough that she wanted to see Jessica in person, so when Jess was 9 days old we drove her to Salt Lake. There we got the official diagnosis of Atrial Tachycardia, "a little electrical problem" which seemed to be resolving itself. The cardiologist watched Jessica nursing and said that the heart thing obviously wasn't affecting her, so we were just going to keep an eye on it, but she didn't expect any problems. We were very relieved after that. Our pediatrician continued to listen long and hard to Jessie's heart every time she went in for a check-up, and she had fewer and fewer skipped beats every time. At 7 months they did another 24 hour monitor like the one she'd worn home from the hospital, and declared her completely better. Of course, that didn't stop me from taking her right in to the doctor when she was about 7 and mentioned mentioned her heart "felt funny," and I reserve the right to do so in the future too.
So those are Jessica's stories! And now she's TEN! She's a great girl, I love her so much and I love having her around. She has so much zest for life, she wants to do everything and try everything. I love the way she goes into everything with confidence and doesn't worry about failing. Just this week she made her first banana bread and learned to crochet. She LOVES horses, she LOVES martial arts (at the moment it's Tae Kwon Do), she loves nature, she plays basketball and writes stories, she sings in the school choir and she's in her second play. She wants to be a cowgirl and own a ranch when she grows up, and she loves all things Native American too. She also loves art and she's getting pretty good at drawing horses. She wants to be tough and be a tomboy and get muddy and climb trees, but she's also incredibly tenderhearted and kind.
Happy birthday Jess, I'm so proud to be your mom!
1 comment:
Very sweet stories. Happy belated birthday, Jessica!
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