First, I want to apologize that I’ve taken so long to update this blog with a new posting. Writing about our experience kind of makes me feel like I’m reliving it. A lot of what I felt I didn’t really remember until I forced myself too so I could write these posting. So, again, I apologize for delaying the next entry to this blog.
After the three, long, long days of waiting to hear from the boys head neonatologist, we finally sat down in a very sterile, teaching room close to the NICU, to review the ultrasounds with the doctor. I’ll never forget how scared I was. I kind of felt like I was in an out of body experience. They had these little desks spread throughout the room. My mother, mother-in-law, husband and myself all went to attend the meeting. Each one of us sat at the back of the room along the back of the wall in these little desks. There was a large space between us and the neonatologist. He was at the front of the room so he could display the ultrasound films on the light board on the opposite wall.
I think that before the doctor even began discussing the findings, I started to check out. It was too much to take. I kept thinking that we shouldn’t have been there. This isn’t what was supposed to happen. I just wanted to bolt. I wanted to get out of that room and I couldn’t. So, he started showing us in the pictures. It was awful. There was all this whiteness to the pictures and I knew that it really was a Grade IV bleed. The bleeding into the ventricles has resulted in a decreased blood supply to other parts of the brain, causing ischemic damage with subsequent bleeding.
Then, he began the prognosis. It scared me to death. The one thing that I heard that stuck in my head was “Cerebral Palsy”. I couldn’t get away from it. I knew what that meant. Other words he used included paralysis, hydrocephalus, life-long neurological deficits, developmental delay, seizures and even death. I knew what his life would end up being. I kept telling myself that I didn’t just spend 9 weeks flat on my back cooking those babies inside of me to have such a negative outcome for one of our children. Then I started to cry. Besides the voice of the endocrinologist speaking, it was deathly quiet. My jolting sobs sounded three times as loud as they were because of the quiet. The doctor was a very gentle man. He truly cared about Matthew’s outcome. At the end of the conversation, he gave us a glimmer of hope. He made a small statement that there are a very small, tiny percentage of babies who do have the bleed discontinue and the blood absorbs into the brain. If this happens, there is a minute chance that the baby could come out of it without any major problems. That was all we needed to hear. We grabbed at that hope and we took it and began to spread it to all of our family and friends. Matthew had half of our state praying for him.
Posted by TripletMomma 
