Miracle Baby英语美文

When Sara Sieber was sixteen weeks pregnant, she and her husband, Tim, went to her obstetrician"s office for a routine ultrasound. The couple was looking forward to finding out whether their baby would be a boy or a girl. The sonogram showed that Sara was carrying a son, her fourth. But there was no time to celebrate the happy news, because the scan also revealed a serious defect.

Sara"s baby"s diaphragm, the thin wall of muscle and connective tissue that separates the abdomen from the chest, was not forming properly. The condition is known as congenital diaphragmatic hernia. Minor cases can usually be repaired surgically shortly after birth. But the entire left half of Sara"s baby"s diaphragm was missing. His tiny stomach and liver were pushing their way into his chest cavity, leaving his tissue-thin lungs with absolutely no room to grow.

"Your baby has virtually no lungs at all," the neonatologist explained as he reviewed a second, more detailed set of ultrasounds. "I"m afraid there"s no hope. I would strongly recommend that you terminate the pregnancy immediately."

"I can"t do that!" Sara gasped, clutching Tim"s hand in a white-knuckled grip.

"If you carry your baby to term, he will almost certainly suffocate to death at birth," the neonatologist said sadly. "There"s a small chance we could keep him alive for up to several months on a ventilator, but then he would die anyway."

"I felt like the whole world had dropped out from under me," recalls Sara. "I"d suffered two previous miscarriages, but they"d happened early in my pregnancies. This was different. I could feel this baby moving inside me. I was already in love with him, and now the doctor was telling me I would never get to hold him in my arms."

As Sara and Tim stood to leave, both of them in tears, the doctor remembered something he"d read in a recent medical journal. "There"s a surgeon in California who"s trying to operate on babies with this condition while they"re still in the womb. It"s highly experimental, and I don"t believe he"s had much success, but I can make a few calls, at least."

Sara wasn"t hopeful. "By the time we got home, I was already grieving the loss of my baby," she says. "I didn"t want him to be born, because as soon as he was born I knew I was going to lose him."

Four days later, the doctor telephoned with a name: Dr. Michael Harrison with the Fetal Treatment Center at the University of California at San Francisco. Sara and Tim decided they had little to lose, so in February of 1996, the couple flew from North Carolina to California for an evaluation.

As babies develop inside the uterus, fluid forms in their lungs and flows out their mouths, contributing to the amniotic fluid that cushions and protects the growing fetus. Dr. Harrison proposed to use this very fluid to help Sara"s baby"s lungs grow bigger. The surgeon would temporarily close off the baby"s trachea. The fluid would then build up inside his lungs, and the mounting pressure would cause them to expand like inflated balloons.

During the previous two and a half years, Dr. Harrison had attempted the procedure on eleven babies. Only one had survived. But in ten of these cases, Harrison had opened the mother"s uterus to operate on the fetus, which usually precipitated a preterm delivery before the babies" lungs had any time to grow.

More recently, Harrison had devised newer, less invasive techniques. Instead of cutting open the mother"s uterus, Harrison was now prepared to perform the surgery orthoscopically. So far he"d tried the improved techniques on only one baby, which had subsequently died.

"You"re an excellent candidate for the surgery, but I"m not going to give you any false hopes," Harrison told the Siebers.

During their visit Sara and Tim also consulted with a hospital obstetrician and a social worker. Both strongly advised the couple not to proceed.

"We"ve seen what these mothers go through, both emotionally and physically, and their babies die, anyway," the obstetrician argued.

The social worker reminded Sara that she had three children back home: Timmy, now nine, Ryan, seven and Jacob, four. "You"d have to move to San Francisco for at least six months. Imagine how that long an absence might affect them."

During the flight home, Sara made up her mind. "I"m not going back there," she told Tim. From the start, Tim"s primary concern had been his wife"s health. But thus far all of the mothers had come through the surgery without serious complications. "This is the only chance we have to help our baby live," he reminded Sara. "Maybe we should give this more thought, discuss it with our doctor back home."

There wasn"t much time. Sara was already twenty-four weeks pregnant. For the surgery to succeed it had to be done by week thirty, because after that the baby"s lungs would begin to produce increasingly less of the vital fluid.

Sara and Tim prayed over their decision. They consulted their obstetrician, who told them, "I"ve seen too many babies choke to death because they simply don"t have enough lungs to draw their first breath. If there"s anything you can do, no matter how slim the chances . . ."

The Siebers"s minister agreed. "You"ve been given the knowledge that this surgery exists. You have to do whatever you can, and then trust in God to do the rest."

"I still wasn"t any more hopeful," Sara remembers. "But I thought, maybe the doctor could learn something that might eventually help some other baby to survive."

The couple left their three sons with Tim"s parents, and before they returned to California, they named their unborn child Samuel. "We named him in honor of the Bible story of Hannah, who dedicated her son"s life to God," says Sara.

Dr. Harrison began the four-hour operation by making a transverse C-section incision in Sara"s abdomen. A sonographer then helped him gently maneuver the baby face-up inside the womb and suture a single stitch through his chin to hold his neck in place.

Next, Harrison made three pencil-thin holes in Sara"s uterus and amniotic sack with surgical trocars—hollow tubes through which he manipulated his instruments, a saline pump to keep the amniotic fluid clear and a camera to monitor his every move. With slow precision the surgeon guided a pair of long-handled orthoscopic scissors toward the baby"s neck and snipped a single, small cut. He parted the skin, and then used a special, titanium lip to close off the baby"s trachea.

"That should do it," Harrison announced to his team as he prepared to close. The operation had gone remarkably well, and the surgeon felt cautiously optimistic.

Dr. Harrison hoped that Samuel would remain inside his mother"s womb until he reached his thirty-fifth week - five weeks shy of full term. But the moment Sara came out of the anesthesia she felt sticky and wet.

"What"s wrong?" she groggily asked a nurse.

"Your water just broke," the nurse replied, and hurried off to find the doctor. Despite Dr. Harrison"s best efforts, the trauma of surgery had taken its toll. Sara"s sack had ruptured, and preterm labor was imminent. Yet it wasn"t uncommon for a twenty-eight-and-a-half-week preemie to survive with the aid of warming beds and respirators. But not Samuel. With no time for the trachea clip to do its job, Sara"s baby seemed fated to die.

But then something remarkable happened. Somehow, the baby shifted position inside the sack, and his tiny head stanched the leak. Slowly, the amniotic fluid began to replenish itself. The pressure inside Samuel"s lungs also continued to rise, and within a few days sonograms revealed substantial lung growth.

"God had intervened, and I was convinced everything was going to be fine," says Sara. But on the twelfth day post-surgery, a second complication arose.

The morning Sara was scheduled to be released from the hospital to a nearby Ronald McDonald House she developed a painful infection that put both her life and the baby"s at risk. This time there could be no reprieve. Live or die - Samuel had to be born.

Dr. Harrison performed a partial C-section, delivering only the baby"s head and neck. He removed the titanium clip and sutured shut the skin. He put in a breathing tube connected to a high-frequency respirator that delivered over three hundred gentle puffs of air every minute. Only then did the surgeon complete the delivery and cut the umbilical cord.

Samuel was nine weeks premature, and weighed a mere three pounds, nine and a half ounces. "He made it this far. That"s got to be a good sign," Dr. Harrison insisted, but other members of the neonatal ICU staff weren"t nearly so hopeful.

"You need to prepare yourself. He"s not going to live," more than one doctor told the Siebers bluntly.

"They kept Samuel so heavily sedated, for the first two weeks of his life I really couldn"t tell if he was alive," recalls Sara. "We prayed and prayed, but no matter what happened, Tim and I both agreed we"d made the right decision to try."

Hour by hour, day by day, little Samuel defied the odds and clung tenaciously to life. When he was a week old Dr. Harrison performed surgery to install a Gore-Tex patch to replace the missing left half of his diaphragm. Two more operations would follow - the first to repair a bilateral hernia and a second to correct a bowel obstruction.

When Samuel was five weeks old, Sara finally got to hold him in her arms for the very first time. "His skin was so translucent, I could trace the map of blood vessels across his tiny body," she says. "I told him how much I loved him, and all about his three brothers who couldn"t wait for us to bring him home."

Even at two and a half months, Sara was still being told by the NICU doctors, "Don"t get your hopes up. He"s still not out of the woods." But Samuel"s lungs continued to develop and grow stronger.

Then, late one evening, Sara and Tim received a phone call at their hotel room. "You might want to come back to the hospital," a nurse told them. "We"ve removed the breathing tube. Samuel is breathing on his own."

"His feeble cries sounded like a tiny, lost kitten," Sara vividly recalls. "After twelve long weeks of prayer and worry, I couldn"t imagine a sweeter sound."

Two weeks later, Samuel was strong enough to fly home to North Carolina. Members of the Siebers"s church met them at the airport carrying a large sign: "Welcome home, Samuel! We love you!" Fellow passengers who had heard the story applauded and cheered as Sara deplaned with her precious cargo cradled snugly in her arms.

That was in July of 1996. Today, more than two years later, Sara"s youngest has grown into a happy, active child who loves riding his tricycle and playing on the backyard swing set with his three brothers.

Samuel"s right lung has reached normal size for his age, though his left lung is only about one-fourth of the normal size. "The Gore-Tex patch will need to be replaced as he grows older, but he hasn"t had a lot of problems they thought he might have," says Tim Sieber.

"We"re all very pleased with how well Samuel has done," says Dr. Harrison. "He"s been a true inspiration for our ongoing work." Indeed, since Samuel"s birth, Harrison and his team have used their refined surgical techniques to operate on eleven more infants with congenital diaphragmatic hernias, and eight are alive and doing well.

One who was particularly moved by Samuel"s success was the hospital social worker who had originally tried to talk Sara out of undergoing the surgery. "The day before I got to take Samuel home she came by and asked if she could hold him," Sara relates. "There were tears in her eyes, and she kept saying again and again, "You"re nothing but a miracle. You"re nothing but a miracle.""