This blog is about the slippery end of the rope journey that I am on for the past 5 months, the journey of being with my precious daughter Ivanna Marie Nikitina, who is resilient, who is a fighter, who dances and practices soccer with her strong kicks inside of me every day despite the hopeless prognosis of the doctors. I am so proud of her and we will keep fighting for life. And also for those of you who are writing your words of support for me and asking me how I am doing, it’s becoming difficult to answer everyone, so I will post the updates here and you can also post your prayers and words of encouragement here. We will fight with Ivanna as long as God permits us.
My blood pressure is high, I have daily
migraines, but doctors take good care of me at the hospital and I will be fine.
Also I can’t thank God enough for my team who are working so hard day till
night to make sure all the clients are taken care of and handling things so
well. I support them as much as I can and it even helps to be distracted with work
at times.
I haven’t written blogs for awhile, but I
think this will really help my mind to unload and I hope to share the spiritual
journey that I have been on for the past few months as well. It’s been the
hardest time of my life so far and the time when God has shown himself so much
to me. I could never do this on my own. He has done so many miracles so far.
“Beauty and pain intertwine into a beautiful dance called life”… these are the
words from some of my old poems, which I used to post in the blog.
Let me begin with the good news. Today,
March 14, marks the day of a major miracle. On March 9, doctors straight up
told me that with the blood supply that my placenta is getting (almost none
according to Doppler readings), it’s impossible for baby to gain the minimum
500 g that they require for NICU to accept me for delivery. And they straight
up told me that I should give up and prepare myself for next pregnancy instead.
They told me that baby can die any day and that it’s in my best interest to end
the pregnancy. I can’t even describe how upset I was, but not only about the
situation, but about how doctors are not willing to fight at all. Baby weight
was 330 g on March 1 at 22 weeks gestation. Babies are supposed to gain about
120+ grams in two weeks and weight measurements has to be done every two weeks
to avoid margin of error.
So today doctors walked in smiling and told
me that baby gained about 100g in 13 days and this is an incredibly good number
for someone with my condition, unbelievable number. She is now 434 g and this
is an estimation, doctor said it could even be 500g in reality, they can’t say
for sure. I was believing for a weight close to 450 g and we got it.
I talked to probably 15 doctors today, from
high-risk team, from my OB team, from NICU. They all wanted to make sure I
understand what kind of “scary” zone I am getting into. I will explain in a
bit. But honestly, even though I wasn’t crying or freaking out while talking to
them, these conversations exhausted me so much, that at the end of the day
migraine again was so bad and the nurse said that my face looks greenish and
swollen.
But the point is this: doctors are on my
side now, I convinced them all to fight for my baby, and the atmosphere
changed. Now it is so much easier to breathe for me. They still say that it’s
one in a million chance for baby to get to a good development stage and be born
normal. Once the main NICU doctor was leaving the room she told me that she
wants me to surprise her because I told her I want to fight for Ivanna to be
that one in a million. I understand that it’s life, I am ready for everything,
so many kids are born not preemies and they still have diseases, disabilities,
and parents don’t give up fighting for them, loving them, getting the best treatments
possible for them. My parents had to give up a lot, borrow a lot of money to
take my youngest sister to Germany for very complex heart surgery with tiny
percent of survival rate, yet God did his miracles, He was faithful to me and
my family so many time. So of course we have to stand in faith this time.
NICU doctor told me that despite the
statistics I read online about a 24-25 week micro-preemie with 500 g weight, my
odds are worse because my baby is IUGR, this means she has been behind in size
and getting less blood/nutrition and it’s unknown whether she developed the
organs properly for a 24 weeker.
So what will happen now? Today they gave me
a super painful steroids shot, this is to get the baby’s lungs the best chance
of development and starting tomorrow they are starting close monitoring. Every
morning they will do an ultrasound measurement of blood flow to placenta and
baby and this means I have to be fasting in the morning since C-section can
happen the moment they see any further deterioration. It’s a miracle that this
blood has been sustaining my baby, some numbers in the blood flow are intermittent
to absent and others are the lowest 5%. But if it gets any worse (called reverse distolic flow), then they will do
emergency c-section right away. And the second thing is they will do half an hour heart
rate measurements a few times a day to detect any problems there early enough for
an emergency c-section.
This is good enough for the first post,
I will post more updates soon!
