Meet Christian — Stroke at age 5 weeks

My third pregnancy was worry free: our biggest concern was whether to use a hospital or have a home birth. As a not-yet 40-year-old mom, I’d had concerns about “birth defects” (who came up with that term?), but I was reassured after I had my ultrasound. The radiologist had requested that I come in and have a third trimester scan, but my midwife said it wasn’t necessary.

Our babe was born in the hospital, not in a bed with attending medical professionals, but  in the bathroom, over the toilet with no nurse and no midwife. When I felt the baby coming, I screamed for my husband.  Lucky for us, he’s a seasoned combat medic with years of medical experience. He heard me scream, dropped the water he was carrying, burst into the room, and kicked open the bathroom door just in time to catch the baby.  No gloves, the amniotic sac broke against his pants.

I knew. Something about the way he felt in my arms, something in his color.

Yes, he had a bruised face from being born so quickly. But there was something else. Now that I think about it, he seemed tired.

The midwife had come in after my husband. My husband had seen our son’s color and pressed the code button. I heard the midwife say ‘Let go!”.

I didn’t. Something stronger in me said, hold on.

Again she yelled. “Let go!”  He was whisked away for a team to give him oxygen and check his vitals.

I asked if my baby was okay. No one answered me.

The bad news began and continued. I’m almost happy that it was doled out in bits. I adjusted to each piece as it was given. His blood sugar was low, so they wanted to give him a little formula or dextrose to bring it back up. I was always taught, breast milk only, so it was hard to agree even to that small intervention. Maybe it was an infection? They gave him antibiotics. Sometime later he was being examined by the Neonatologist.  After hearing his heart, she moved the stethoscope to his head and heard a bruit – that’s one of the indicators of a rare condition called Vein of Galen Malformation. The neonatologist called for an emergency MRI to confirm the diagnosis.

Our sweet boy got sicker and sicker. He was in heart failure and other organs were struggling.  He needed a procedure called an embolization to save his life. The Neuroradiologist inserted a small catheter filled with platinum coils into his femoral artery (in his groin) and then then threaded the catheter up into his brain. When he located the spot in Christian’s brain where the fistula was, he injected the coils along with onyx glue to make the vein thrombose. The idea is that once that happens, the pressure would normalize as blood flow was pushed into other areas of his brain.

Thankfully he survived the procedure and began to do a bit better. Five weeks later, he was healthy enough to undergo another embolization. As he was being closely monitored after the embolization, I saw his foot move in a way that didn’t seem normal. My husband told me later that I mentioned it to the nurse. In short, order doctors were flocking around his bed and an EEG was set up. Christian was having seizures, focal clonic seizures, due to a stroke he’d suffered. We left the hospital after 72 days.  I thought Christian’s journey was done. I never dreamed of all the rehab ahead of us.