Miracle Baby
Stories of Life/Fall 2021
At forty-three I’d accepted the idea of not having children and Jose, my husband, had already had a vasectomy when we’d met, so our baby was a stunner from the get-go. Having defied such odds, we were hopeful the repeat ultrasound would put an end to the doctor’s suspicion that part of his brain was missing.
Instead she said, ‘It’s definitely not there.’
‘Can it grow?’ we asked.
‘No. If it is not there now, it never will be.’
That bitter March day, my husband and I walked out to the parking lot silent, tearless. We went to Red Lobster and repeated short words and phrases to each other.
‘What did she say? Maybe she’s wrong?’
When we got home we started googling and that’s when the panic set in. Hydrocephaly, seizures, autism, blindness, profound learning disabilities, lifetime incontinence, inability to speak, inability to walk...
The following week we went to see the priest. I sat in the rectory meeting room and sobbed to Father R, certain I was the cause of our son’s disorder.
Father R stopped me mid-bawl. ‘This. Is. Not. Your. Fault.’
Jose stood against the wall, speechless as Father R rubbed my hands with the oil for the sick and told me all my perceived sins were forgiven.
At 30 weeks, our son showed signs of early arrival and having lost all my amniotic fluid, I was hospitalised and put on extreme bed rest.
‘Whose heart is that?’ asked the doctors, checking the heart rate strips out at the main desk.
It was our son’s, the strongest heart on the maternity floor.
The night before our son was born, a colleague sent out an email requesting that people show their support, prompting hundreds of emails, picture after picture of lit candles.
Still, my body trembled. I’d done my best to banish dark thoughts, but now profound fear seemed to radiate deep from my core. Seven neo-natal intensive care (NICU) nurses and doctors were lined up, ready to whisk our newborn son away.
It wasn’t until Jose entered the delivery room decked out in scrubs, fully energised, that I began to relax. If he could be brave, then I could be too. We were in this together.
Minutes later, I heard Jose rejoice, ‘Look, Maggie, look!’
Held above me, in the hands of the doctor, I found our baby. Pedro. I reached out my finger and touched his; he grabbed on, and I released a flood of tears.
‘He looks good, Maggie,’ said the NICU doctor.
That evening, we held onto this strand of hope as Pedro, hours old, was taken for an MRI. I imagined him, a tiny, unknowing bundle beneath the huge magnet.
Within a few days, it was official. Our son’s brain was full, complete, perfect.
Eight years later, I still say our Pedro came to Earth on a lightning bolt, jettisoned by all those prayers, led by the shimmer of one hundred candles.
Even Jose, who is not a religious man, calls our son a miracle.
