Gabby's Story

I keep telling Rob I should get a party along with Gabby on her birthday after what it took to get her here. I wouldn't really want that but I can joke about it. I at least earned that right after all my poor body went through.

I decided to post about Gabby's pregnancy and birth today, the day before her birthday. But first I have to go back a little bit to the time when there were just three cute little boys in the Harris household.

I wanted more children. Rob did not. Of course I wanted to wait awhile because the boys were born in 1991, 1992, and 1993! So once Ryan was three years old I started pestering Rob about trying for a girl. I didn't care if I had a boy or a girl I was ready to have another baby, but I just knew I would have a girl. Rob had FINALLY come around and decided he wanted a baby too so we tried for another. I got pregnant immediately and at 10 weeks had a missed miscarriage which involved a laproscopic surgery and seeing how I am allergic to ALL pain meds...that was NOT fun. I was devastated. I had been so sure this was what we were supposed to do. Then for 6 months I had "girly" complications and didn't know if I'd ever be able to get back to normal and conceive again.

But sure enough we got pregnant with Riley and I had a normal, wonderful pregnancy. She was born full term, healthy and beautiful. (Full term is a big sigh of relief for anyone but since I had Tyler almost 8 weeks prematurely due to a complete placental abruption, it's a HUGE sigh of relief for me.)

A little time went by, and Rob and I both wanted to have one more baby. He deployed a lot. Then I was on medication that I couldn't get pregnant while taking. Then Rob took the leap and got out of the Army. Well...no job you'd think pregnancy was not high on my "To Do" list but it happened anyway. Rob was in Basic Law Enforcement Training in North Carolina and we were living with his dad. They were awesome and supportive of the pregnancy. But then at 14 weeks my water broke and I about died (literally) having a miscarriage. Again I had to have surgery because I was hemorrhaging and almost needed a blood transfusion. This miscarriage was heartbreaking for me. I was already showing. After watching what I went through with the miscarriage, (nearly losing consciousness from fluid loss while having a miscarriage in a wheelchair in front of a bunch of strangers in an ER waiting room...) Rob wasn't sure he even wanted to try anymore. We both endured a two or three month depression over the loss of that baby.

But 6 months later, I found out I was pregnant with Gabby. I had a few problems early on but nothing out of the ordinary. When we moved back home to Las Vegas I was 5 months pregnant and starting to have a little bit of edema in my ankles, which I attributed to sitting in and driving a van across the country for four straight days.

At about the 7 1/2 month mark I had a mild stroke. I had also started gaining about a pound and a half a day. My kidneys were shutting down. My doctor admitted me to the hospital and I was on complete bed-rest. My blood pressure was ridiculously high. They did an amniocentesis to check on Gabby's lung development and she was very underdeveloped. A steroid shot did almost nothing to improve her lungs. Rob was in the process of getting hired on the Police Department, going through psychological testing and physicals during all of this. It's a wonder he got hired with all the stress he had to be under.

Gabby was due December 25th of 2002. That's why we picked the name Gabrielle Christine. Gabrielle because the angel Gabriel foretold Christ's birth and Christine because it's so similar to the name Christ. But we always knew we would call her "Gabby". By Monday the 18th of November, my doctor became concerned about my cough and ordered a chest x-ray. My lungs were full of fluid and my doctor was convinced my body was drowning itself. He wanted to do an immediate and urgent c-section. But Rob was in his last psychological evaluation interview. We called him and they let him reschedule and he rushed to the hospital to get there in time to join me as they were attempting the first of three spinal blocks. Turns out my doctor was right in insisting in an immediate c-section as my liver shut down too. My blood results indicated that I had also developed HELLP syndrome. Gabby was also breech.

I don't remember very much of her birth. It was so fast, it was all a blur. I do remember that Rob was cracking jokes, he even called me a marsupial! Turkey. Gabby was born at 10:51AM weighing 4 pounds 12 ounces and measuring 17 1/2 inches long. Of course, I couldn't hold her because I was so weak and she was in respiratory distress. I barely remember kissing her forehead as a nurse held her briefly to my face. Then they whisked her away since she wasn't breathing. I remember feeling like I was not in my body, slipping out, so to speak. I crashed on the operating table right after she was wheeled away. And they had sent Rob off to the NICU with Gabby so I felt so alone as the doctors and nurses were rushing around me trying to make sure I didn't die. I remember feeling like I was so ashamed of myself for ever wanting to quit or give up when life got hard because I just knew, all I had to do was give up and I would die right there. When faced with death, it turned out, I really wasn't ready to stop living, even though this life is really rough. I prayed harder than I can ever remember praying before in my life that I would live through it and respect my life more from then on.

Suddenly a scripture, that I never even remembered reading before, entered my thoughts. These exact words, found in D&C 84:88 came to my mind. "I will be on your right hand and on your left,...and mine angels round about you, to bear you up." Peace flooded my heart and I literally felt physically buoyed up. I knew I would live. I knew my daughter was being offered the same protection. I could imagine angels surrounding her, encouraging her and blessing her.

I don't remember anything else until I woke up briefly in the recovery room. The next two days I had to be on pitocin because I had been hemorrhaging again, and I was on magnesium sulfate so that I hopefully wouldn't have any seizures. My hypertension was still being closely followed. Being allergic to all pain medications, my face was extremely swollen and itchy from the morphine and I was severely nauseated for days. I was able to convince them to just give me ibuprofen and I would make it through the c-section pain just fine. My doctor told me later that he couldn't believe how tough I was as he didn't expect me to be able to handle it without pain pills. Hello...people did it for centuries before...I was just fine.

When Gabby was two days old I tried to go to the NICU to see her, in a wheelchair, but as soon as I got there I became dizzy and weak. I kissed her hand and cried all the way back to my room because I couldn't make my body heal any faster so I could take care of my baby.

I ended up being released a few days later, after begging my doctor to let me go home (I was doing controlled breathing to calm my heart rate before every blood pressure reading). And I told my doctor I didn't have any headaches or blurred vision, when I did. SO STUPID! I'm so lucky I didn't have a seizure later on at home! What was I thinking?!

Rob and I sat in the hospital parking lot the night I was released, reliving a moment we had to go through after Tyler was born. We were leaving another one of our children at a hospital, instead of taking her home with us to join our excited family. We both shed many tears that evening. For many nights I slept with one of her binki's near my face because they were vanilla flavored/scented and so that's what she smelled like.

It looked like she was going to come home in time for Thanksgiving, but that day she took a turn for the worse and stopped breathing on her own again. She did finally get to come home after 3 weeks as a birthday present to Rob.

It took another two months or so for my kidneys to get back to normal. My blood pressure finally normalized too. I have a little bit of permanent liver damage but it isn't too bad. I do get frustrated by the changes to my memory since the stroke. But that, too, is mild. I did joke with Rob in the recovery room that he better not even kiss me until he had a *vasectomy. I was NOT going to go through another surgery, being pain med allergic, to get a tubal ligation.

Gabby had a few complications for a little while. She was diagnosed failure to thrive at three months and we really had to fight to get her to eat for awhile. But she pulled through and is now a spunky, loving, wonderful, soon to be 6-year-old. She is a joy and we are so blessed to have been able to have her finish our family.

She is cuddly and snugly and innocent and sweet. I get at least 45 hugs a day! She loves to read stories and help mommy do the dishes. Some days she is so proud of her blue eyes and other days she wishes she had brown eyes like everyone else in the family. She calls Corey, Tyler and Ryan "The Brothers". She loves to draw and paint and color and she's quite the talented budding artist. (She doesn't even color on the walls anymore.) She is energetic and imaginative. She walks around the house singing all day. And if she doesn't know the words to a song she makes up her own. "So ko lee lee, lo lo feely" are words she swears are lyrics to a song she hears on the radio a lot. Since she is the baby in the family and had 4 years alone with mommy while everyone else was at school, she is very skilled at entertaining herself and playing with her imaginary friends. She had friends called "Pink Mouth" and "Blue Mouth". She said they lived in the palm trees in our backyard. And they loved to swim in our pool. Picture a little kid talking to big pink and blue lips. Rolling Stone lips always came to mind. Well, we thought they were named Pink Mouth and Blue Mouth until we went to the theater to see Ratatouille and she said something about that cute "mouth" and we realised she had been saying MOUSE incorrectly with her speech issues. Then we wondered, well, hoped really, that she hadn't seen any ACTUAL mice in the backyard! Lately though, she has outgrown her imaginary buddies. (Either that, or the cat that visits our backyard, uh, took care of them. Ew.) She's a crack-up! We love our fiery little redhead.
Of course, she is worth every bit of what it took to get her here!

*(REALLY funny story: I didn't know when I picked Gabby's doctor that he went to the same church I did, because we had just moved back to Las Vegas. So imagine my surprise, and embarrassment, when I saw him at church the Sunday after my first exam. Rob couldn't understand the big deal...UNTIL he ran into his doctor at church the Sunday after he had his vasectomy. Turns out he was in the ward that shared the building with us. I thought it was awesome and he developed some empathy for what I had experienced.)