Okay, Day 2 just happens to be what would have been John and Hallie’s 9 month birthday, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about my sweet babies today. Most of you will know all of this but take a moment to remember them with me if you don’t mind.
I had a very difficult 2nd trimester, bleeding on and off. Nearly every week, I had an ultrasound and was comforted to see that my babies were looking beautiful, very active in the womb, and developing right on schedule. Well, John apparently didn’t think he needed to wait to come into the world. Hallie had always been the leader baby (low one that would come out first) but in April, John started trying to switch that around and I think that repositioning is what caused the preterm labor. I started having contractions around April 21st. I was sent home with a contraction monitor and my mother came down to take care of me, but a week later, the contractions weren’t slowing and when we went back to the hospital, I was dilated to 5 cm.
On April 28th, at 1:37 a.m. and 1:38 a.m., John Andrew and Hallie Sara Kinser came into this world. They were so tiny and yet so perfect. Both had Apgar scores of 7 at 1 minute and 8 at 5 minutes. I heard that and felt very hopeful about their health. John didn’t cry, but Hallie had quite the squall even with her undeveloped lungs. It was her way of letting us know that she was NOT happy with her brother and she would have been very content staying inside Mommy for another 4 months. I was just amazed – you see these 2-D black and white, grainy images on an ultrasound and wonder what in the world the babies will look like coming out so early. They looked perfect and so beautiful. Perfectly formed little hands and little toes just amazed me. I was concerned as I saw their little eyes and ears were not fully developed, but was reassured that would happen in time. They were each 1 pound, 6 ounces (well, Hallie was 6.5 ounces) and just now in getting their medical records, we found out that they were 12 inches long (technically, John was 31 cm which put him a little bit longer than Hallie). They were so beautiful…and so scary. I mean, they were so tiny and looked so fragile and so vulnerable for this big world.
Anyway, let me start by telling you about our precious John. He proved why he was ready to come into this world by moving so much quicker than Hallie that first week. Before we knew it, he was peeing up a storm – nurses would roll their eyes about how much he was peeing, and everyone told us what a good sign this was. He got off his blood pressure medicine in a few days, and we all loved to go visit him and see him flail around – arms and legs going everywhere…I loved it until I started worrying about him pulling out his wires and tubes, but he never did. We were sure he would be coming home long before Hallie because his lungs appeared remarkably strong. He was breathing so well that after just one week, they took him off the ventilator. He had some apnea and bradycardia episodes, but for one day, he did as well as anyone could have possibly expected, and we were all amazed by him. Both Reagan and I got a little nervous to watch his little body take the breaths – he was just so tiny and it looked like such hard work to breathe. Nurses who had Hallie would shake their heads about her but try to make us feel better by talking about how well John was doing. We took one picture of John, but we just stood back most of the time – excited about how well he was doing and assuming we would have lots of time for better pictures and to touch and hold him.
And that was Week 1. I sang “Happy 1 Week Birthday” to Hallie, but I forgot to with John and figured I would do it when I visited him at night. Mom got a real kick out of the fact they put John on a CPAP machine…just like his grandma, to help with the breathing. About 5 pm, I got a phone call from the surgeon that John was going to need a routine surgery where they take out a small section of intestine. Remarkably, I remember not worrying too much. I loved the surgeon and had such faith any time he was involved in something with our children…Dr. Bloss is clearly a strong Christian and I just always felt that God was with him in all he did with our babies. Well, we didn’t hear anything and Reagan and I headed back down to see the twins that night when we get a call that the surgery had gone well, but they discovered that John’s liver was bleeding and there was no way to stop that – it wasn’t like they could stitch it up or anything. This was serious and prayer was the only thing we could do…so we prayed there in the car and texted/called/had mom e-mail everyone we could think of to pray as well.
We spent an hour with Hallie and then the doctor came over to talk with us about John – it was serious and much to be concerned about. They were giving him transfusions and did not think the bleeding had stopped. His blood pressure had dropped dramatically and heart rate skyrocketed, and he had stopped making urine. The next 48 hours were critical in terms of kidney function and if he did not start peeing by then, there was no hope. Dr. Thompson is a wonderful, brilliant woman, but there is no mixing words with her – she tells you straight what you have to be concerned about and she did a good job making us realize just how serious little John was. She let us go back to see him and it was a horrid sight, and yet, the doctor was encouraged because his blood pressure and heart rate were much more acceptable than they had been when she had started talking with us. He had 11 blood transfusions in the next 8 hours and fairly steadily needed some sort of blood product for the rest of his days. He was put back on paralytic medicine, and we really never saw him active except for a few moments every now and then when one dose of the medicine was wearing off. We were kind of okay with that since we knew he must be in some pain.
The next morning when Mom and I went to visit him, our beloved nurse, Cassie, simply told us that he was a very sick boy. He was not peeing and they were not sure about how his liver was doing. Next day, still not peeing, and we started to see the effects of this – he was beginning to really swell. We kind of knew that the bleeding had not completely stopped internally because we also saw his color start to change, and over the next week pink became purple became this ghastly dark color. Since he wasn’t peeing, fluid was building up in his body tissues as well, and you tried to find the easiest places to look each day – hands and feet usually didn’t look quite as swollen and were kind of pink, even if it was just the glow of the pulse-ox monitor. Reagan called him the Incredible Hulk, and I teased him about being ‘swol’ and we just tried to keep the mood positive when we were with John. That Friday, I came in and started crying as the nurse said he had some pee in his catheter. I really hoped this was the beginning of a miraculous turnaround and he would start peeing rivers, but that day didn’t come. The next few days were filled with everything from a horrific scare where the doctor called us at home and told us to get there as soon as possible because John was bleeding from his abdomen and they couldn’t stop it (thank you prayer partners, because by the time we got there that day, the bleeding had stopped) to a wonderfully peaceful first Mother’s Day – and each day he was just a bit more swollen, a bit more discolored, but still peeing just the tiniest amounts and still fighting as hard as any parent could ever ask their child to fight. We believed that he would be one of those miracle babies and hoped each day to see a dramatic improvement in his condition.
That final day when we called in the morning, they told me that Reagan should come down with me, and we knew things weren’t good. We got there and his blood pressure mean was only 6; they wanted mid 20s for a low reading, so he was really bottoming out. The swelling was so extreme that he was oozing fluid out of his skin, and it was making no indent in his swelling. We got there around 11, and we spent the next six hours watching the blood pressure slowly drop and his heart rate slowly drop until a little after 5 when the heart rate plummeted from the 130s to under 100 beats per minute. The doctor came and gave him an epinephrine shot with no effect, and we all agreed chest compressions would just be cruel.
This is when I got to hold my son for the first and only time in his life. It might be one of the most beautiful, yet saddest, moments of my life. They told us that often, a baby’s heart rate will rebound when being held by the mother, and I hoped my bond with John would have that effect. It did, and we had this wonderful moment of holding him and seeing a good heart rate, even though we knew it was his final moments. Reagan and I both gave him a kiss on the forehead, and Reagan told him that he was going to be in a better place and with God and all the grandparents he was named for…you know, at the time, it was such a sad moment – we were praying for a miracle and this was not what we had in mind. Looking back on it, it was such a beautiful moment because it was the one time I got to hold him.
THREE POINTS as I’m going to have to wrap-up story time for today and talk about my sweet Hallie tomorrow.
1 - The amazing thing I realized with both my children is how beautiful they were to me – that all I saw was my child that I loved. That love colored my vision and even when they were at their absolute worst, I found their beauty and was filled with love. I have to believe that’s how God feels about us. We all have our ‘discolorations’ and we all swell up with awful sinful thoughts from time to time, but God still sees His beautiful children when He looks at us. I had a Sunday school teacher a few years ago who talked about our “Jesus suits” – we all wear them all the time and God just sees perfect Jesus when He looks at us – how awesome is that! The love a parent has for their children must just be a fraction of God’s great love for us, and the greatness of that love is just beyond my comprehension.
2 – For anyone who has lost a child and suffers from the thoughts that no person can possibly understand what they are going through, I’m going to say you are right. I have found each person handles this experience completely differently and you can find comfort in knowing that there are others like you, but you also can feel isolated because the experience is unique for each of us. HOWEVER, one thing that brought me tremendous comfort when we lost John was knowing that GOD KNEW my pain – God lost his son as well, and when you lose a child and cannot make sense of how an innocent life is taken, KNOW that God also lost an innocent child and He knows your heart and is loving you through it.
3 – Even though John’s little life was so short, please see all the miracles that we see within that time frame. There was a first week full of success stories and positive reports and a mom and dad beaming with pride. Every good thing was a gift from God. And then there were the absolute miracles – the answers to prayer giving us time to come to grips with the best thing for John being for miraculous healing that took him to heaven. There was the night the bleeding started and clear doubt that he would make it through that night. There was his ability to start peeing again even with all that his little body was suffering from. There was the call that he had started bleeding from the abdomen, only to arrive and find out a clot had come loose and he was doing better. There was a peaceful Mother’s Day where no one said anything negative about my son to me and let me enjoy what little successes he was having that day. There was the day before he passed when Mom and I saw his blood pressure plummet only to be brought back up and have him hang on. And there was the ability for Reagan and I to be there with him when he passed away - and to not have to make a decision to take him off machines or anything – God took him and it was obvious that was what happened. It may seem so odd that I felt such peace and also such love from God at that time; I knew God was doing what was best for our son.
More tomorrow - like I said, I apologize if I start out rambling away…I just love to share these stories because I so clearly see God in each one of them. John was only 16 days old when he passed away, but each day of his life was a statement about the power and glory of God – how many of us can pick 16 days of our life and say that about them? He inspired me to want God to show in every part of my life story.
Thanks for reading and letting my children live on not just in my memory, but now in your memory as well.
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16 Rocks. ;)
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