Meet Sawyer

• Baby Saves

• 10.19.16

I’m laying here next to our miracle baby. She’s our third that we fought so hard to conceive. We lost four pregnancies and almost my life to an ectopic rupture.

She’s three weeks old and we are smitten. Her older brother in love, as well.

It breaks my heart to think we almost lost her.

At 34 weeks, I had a day where she wasn’t moving much. This wasn’t normal for her. I laid down, drank lots of water and drank some OJ. Something wasn’t right.

I called my perinatologist and went in for a nonstress test the next morning. She wasn’t having the appropriate accelerations. They had to buzz her to get the minimum allowed to pass.  I was sent home and told not to worry.

A week later, I went into preterm labor. I arrived at the hospital and the triage nurse couldn’t pick up my contractions on the monitor well and wanted to send me home. My MFM advocated for me because of the borderline nonstress test, lack of movement and admitted me.

Labor was uneventful until I hit 10 cm. The baby’s heart rate plummeted, and they placed me on oxygen. The nurses rolled me on my side and then back to my back to push. Each time the baby’s heart rate plummeted.

The MFM gasped when she delivered the baby and held up her cord. She had a true knot.

The doctor kept saying she had only seen a few in her many years and they had not had a positive outcome. She said we were lucky that I had preterm labor because had we gone full-term, she could’ve been in real danger of not making it. My heart burst.

We had had so many ultrasounds – biweekly from 12-34 weeks. We had non stress tests and biophysical profiles the last few weeks. How could this not be known earlier?

We spent a week in the NICU for respiratory distress, but she is home safe now.

I want to thank your campaign for striking in my mind that I needed to advocate for myself and my baby when movement wasn’t normal. Even a third-time mom needed this reminder.