Meet Chesney

• Baby Saves

• 10.06.16

I wanted to share my story and how fetal movement awareness saved my daughter. I’d made a point to Count the Kicks when I first started to feel movement.

At 32+5 weeks, Chesney had always been an extremely active baby. On Dec. 13 and 14, I was very busy but noticed decreased fetal movement. Enough that on Dec. 15 when I woke up with nothing in my stomach, I drank a big glass of OJ and laid on my left side. There was little to no movement.

I’m a first-time mom and didn’t really want to be paranoid or bother the doctor so it took some convincing from my boyfriend to call the on-call doctor as it was a Saturday.

They told me to come to Labor & Delivery.

After an hour on the monitor, they took me to have an ultrasound. We were waiting for the doctor to come in to discuss the ultrasound when the nurse popped in and said, “They told you we’re going to deliver your baby today, right?”

I was in shock!

The doctor told us that during the ultrasound they found the cord was wrapped around her neck twice, and when I turned on my left side she stopped breathing.

The emergency c-section happened very quickly and Chesney was born.

Not that finding the cord wasn’t miracle enough, but later we were told she had a fetal maternal hemorrhage where she was losing blood, but not into the placenta where it would be noticed. I was absorbing any blood lost back into my body.

The doctor said her blood levels were so low she wouldn’t have made it if we’d waited another ten minutes to deliver her.  So because of your campaign, I was more aware of her movement and able to bring attention to a problem, and because of that problem, saved her life!

I’ve been advocating to ladies on the mommy forums every time they post decreased movement.. Don’t wait to call! We need to pay attention to our bodies and intuition! Thank you so much for bringing awareness to this issue!!

– Erica, Chesney’s mom