The full story of life and death in a mere 19 days
I know that some of you know the details of what happened with Danika, I have been giving snippets here and there, but what follows is the full story from the morning I woke up and knew that I was going into labor until the day that she passed away.
It was the morning of May 7th, and I woke up with back pain that the strongest of medications wasn't even touching and I was occasionally feeling what I was thinking to be contractions. I had never gone through contractions before, but what was happening is what I figured they would be feeling like. For about a half hour I thought about what I was going to do. I had to decide if I was going to tell my nurse what was happening or if I was going to attempt to hide it for just two more days. I wanted Danika to make it to 24 weeks and I was willing to sacrifice my life in order to get her to the age that gave her greater odds of survival, since every day that she stayed inside gave her that much more hope, that much greater chance of survival. After going back and forth in my head about this, I decided to err on the side of better judgment and tell the nurse what was happening.
I told the nurse, who called the attending, who poked at my uterus, it was tender and sore so told me that I had started to go septic. They called a lab tech to come up and take blood to check my white cell count and less than an hour later it was confirmed that I was going septic and today was going to be the day that I had been dreading. I was going to be delivering. I had no say in the matter. I called John to tell him what was happening and to tell him that he needed to get on a plane back to San Diego, he called one of my best friends Dan and asked Dan to come sit with me until John got into town. Dan got to the hospital shortly after 10am, and by this time I realise that it would have been impossible for me to hide what was going on for two more days because I was having contractions every half hour or so, and it felt like my body was being ripped in half.
Dan and I tried our hardest to stay calm, I was off and on the phone with John while he booked a plane ticket and at some point I think it was either me or John that called my dad to tell him what was happening. I had spoken to Johns mom in the morning and through tears and gasps of air I told her what was happening, Danika was going to make her way into the world today. Dan did an amazing job of keeping me calm and would hold my had through the hard parts and kept me laughing during the easier parts. If Dan had not been there, I'm not really sure what I would have done.
Shortly after they got back my lab results and as the contractions started getting more frequent, they decided that it was time to move me down from the antepardom ward down to labor and delivery and get me set up to get an epidural and get set up to start getting the pictocin to start the contractions. During this time I found out that John was going to be getting in around 2:30 and my dad was going to be leaving work. They moved me down to the labor and delivery ward and Dan did what he does best, he kept me laughing despite the fact that I felt my entire world was crashing down around me. Dan offered to go pick up John from the airport and about the time that Dan left, my dad got there and was freaking out. I love my dad, but he didn't help the situation any.
I told the nurse that I wanted pain control and I wanted it now, because I felt like I was being ripped in half with each contraction and they were becoming more and more frequent even without getting the medication to induce me yet. It was happening on it's own, I had no choice. Just about the time that Dan left to go get John is when the doctors came in to do my epidural. When they were getting that set up, the IV that I had in my left arm had infused, so they needed to put in another IV to administer the pictocin and any other medications I may need. Here is where a problem came in, I have hypotension and tiny veins, so getting an IV in me proves to be extremely difficult. I had nurses poking me multiple times in each arm in an attempt to get an IV in me, each time they failed made it that much harder for them to try again and it was stressing me out which was causing my heart rate and Danikas heart rates to go into scary ranges.
Finally they are ready to get the epidural in me and instead of having an attending putting the epidural in, they had a resident working on me. I understand that UCSD medical center is a teaching hospital, but having a resident working on someone who is going septic and they are showing that there is fetal distress is not the right thing to do. Anyway, the resident attempted to get the epidural in me. Six times. One time she hit a bone, she was going through muscle and ligaments and stuff that HURT when they are being poked with the giant epidural needle. This was the only part of my entire labor and delivery that I was actually screaming, because every time they pulled the needle out and stuck it back in again I felt like I was either going to pass out or hit someone. I flinched really bad when she hit one of my bones and they yelled at me that I can't flinch when they are working that close to my spinal cord and I told them that if they weren't hitting bones then I wouldn't be screaming and flinching. John got to the hospital around 3:00, and walked in during this all happening. The nurse that was working on my left arm finally got an IV in. The attending finally pulled the resident off of me and a minute later my epidural was in and being taped to my back. I was terrified that I was going to move in bed wrong and pull out the catheter, but it was taped extremely well. Thank God.
Once the epidural was in and the IV was in and I got settled, my dad and Dan joined John and I in the room as they started giving me the medication for the epidural. At first the dose they gave me didn't work so they had to come back and give me a bigger dose. About a minute and a half after they gave me the second huge dose I was looking at the guys and told them that I didn't feel good. I told them that I felt like I was going to puke and that I needed the nurse. From talking to my dad, John and Dan they said that when I said this, I went from being my normal color to grey to blue in a matter of seconds. I was crashing. They ran in and took my blood pressure and it was 35/20. My heart rate was dropping and Danikas heart rate was dropping, I was dying. They ran in and pushed a bunch of epinephrine into my IV to get my heart rate and blood pressure back up and for a few minutes it was very touch and go. They were discussing if they should just do an emergency c-section or if they should continue to try to have me have a natural birth. The decision was made to continue on the course of the pictocin and see how Danika and I did with it. About 5:30pm they started me on the pictocin and within a few minutes I started getting stronger contractions. Slowly the first dose of medication they gave me in my epidural started wearing off and I was feeling every contraction, every couple of minutes. With each contraction, my blood pressure would lower to an unsafe range and Danika would show that she was in distress.
At 7:30 they took me off the pictocin and said they were trying to decide if they were going to do a c-section. They kept running in with an ultra sound machine to check on Danika because they kept losing her heart rate and my blood pressure was constantly at a very low, very unsafe level. I finally told the nurse that I needed more medication in my epidural because what they were giving me just wasn't cutting it. I was crying because I felt so bad, I kept telling them that every contraction I was hurting her and I wasn't even trying to. I felt so guilty that I was hurting her. The doctors came back in and gave me another huge dose of the epidural medication and we went through the process of having to give me epinephrine again to keep my heart rate and blood pressure up. A few minutes later the bottom half of my body was completely numb, so I was no longer feeling the contractions but I know that they were still happening because they kept losing Danikas heart rate. Once I was numb I was really tired and was having a hard time staying awake, this was all around 10pm or so.
About 10:10 they ran in again with the ultrasound machine because they had completely lost Danika. The doctors decided to check to see how dilated I was, and I was at 5cm, which is all I needed to be, so it was go time. They handed John this suit to put on and all the stuff to cover up with because I was going to be delivering in an operating room in case something went wrong and they needed to do surgery. I started to freak out, and then I started to shiver and my heart rate kept dropping once I was in the OR. They told me to move myself from the labor bed to the operating table, with my body half numb, but I needed to make sure that I didn't push at all. I started crying and told them that I couldn't do that. I had no strength. I was ready to give up.
Somehow I managed to get onto the operating table and I started freaking out because I thought that I was going to fall off and I was freezing. My hands were like ice because of what was going on with my blood pressure. I think once I was in the operating room there was one more discussion of whether or not they wanted to do a c-section and they decided that I didn't need a c-section. So they got me ready to push.
They told me to push, I pushed and Danika came out in one push. Danika had arrived into the world at 10:32 pm, and just as quickly as she was born she was swept away by the NICU doctors. I continued to lay on the operating table while they tried to get my placenta to detach. After pushing on me and doing various other things, they told me they had gotten 90% of it out and that the other 10% should pass on it's own. There were doctors in the OR talking about how they could tell from just looking at my placenta that it was infected and that they were going to be passing samples of it to this doctor who is the leader in researching placenta related things. In the morning I had been started on the strongest antibiotics that they could give me at the time and they told me that I was going to be in the hospital for a while longer to finish the course of antibiotics to fight off the sepsis.
About midnight I finally emerged from the operating room and was moved back to the labor room I had been in earlier and was greeted by my dad and Dan. Texts and calls were being placed to family and friends to let everyone know that she had been born and that she was doing well, all things considered. A little bit after I got back the NICU doctors and the OB doctors came in to talk to me. John was allowed to go see Danika and take pictures of her, I was told that I could see her as soon as I could stand up, walk and go to the bathroom. That was what was required of me in order to be moved back to the ward I was in before. The NICU doctors told us that Danika had a few major hurdles to handle and that if she was able to make it past them then she had a greater chance of survival. Her major hurdles were 24 hours, 72 hours and 2 weeks.
When she came out she was trying to breathe and trying to cry and she was kicking and moving around. I felt her kick my leg before they took her. They came back a few minutes later to show us the umbilical cord that had a perfect knot in it and tell us that she had been intubated and was doing well.
Now it was time to rest until the epidural wore off so I could stand and go to the bathroom. About 1am I was able to do that, while not completely stable on my feet, I was able to get up and walk which amazed the doctors. I kept telling the nurse I wanted to go to the NICU to meet my daughter and I was told that I would be wheeled there on the way to my room in the ward upstairs. John came back and showed me pictures of her and all I could really do was cry was because she was so small. She wasn't ready to come out into the world yet, I felt like I had let her down. Dan and my dad left for a little bit to get something to eat since the cafe was open until 2am.
Finally around 4am I was wheeled to the NICU to meet my daughter for the first time. I cried because she was so small. I cried because she was so beautiful. I cried because she was a little miracle that was defying odds. I cried because for the first time in my life I understood complete and unconditional love that happened in an instant. I cried because I couldn't hold her and I couldn't give her the kiss I wanted to. I cried because I became a mother 16 weeks early and I was completely overwhelmed. I can't remember if Dan got to meet her that night or not. I know he met her at one point when he brought me a quilt from his church for her isolator, but I was started to get delirious.
After Danika and I met, I was moved back up to the room where I had been earlier in the day, seeing all the same nurses that I had seen for the past few weeks that I was in the hospital. After I got settled I said bye to Dan and thanked him for being so amazing my time of need. I said bye to my dad and said goodnight to John. I had to keep asking for pain medication because my back was all kinds of screwed up because of them messing my epidural up. I could barely stand. I could barely walk.
The next morning I wanted to see Danika as soon as I woke up, so I got myself ready and I was wheeled down to see her. While I was standing next to her isolator I started getting light headed and almost passed out so I was told that I needed to go back up to my room. But Danika was doing fabulous. She was breathing on her own, she was breathing room air. She was getting medication because her blood pressure was low and she had a couple of blood transfusions. They had put an IV in her and she had an umbilical line for various things that they were giving her. She was under photo therapy lights because she had jaundice, but overall she was doing good. I was told to go rest and come back and see her later.
I was in the hospital for a week after she was born fighting off the sepsis. I spent my first mothers day in the hospital. I went to see her when I was allowed, though I never really stayed more than an hour or so because the NICU freaked me out and the longer I was there the more and more anxious I would get and I would end up having a panic attack when I left.
When she was around 4 days old I had gone to visit her and not called first and walked in on a group of doctors all standing around her with like four or five nurses. Danika had decided to pull out her IV and PIC line, so they were trying to decide what to do to give her the medication to keep her blood pressure up, so they decided to give her steroids via her umbilical line. They were going to wait a day to let her skin mature just a little bit more, because every time they touched her or held onto her skin too long it would start to break down because it's not mature enough to be touched yet.
For the most part she did fabulous. She was the talk of the hospital and the doctors were all amazed at how well she was doing. Once she reached two weeks I calmed down some and was prepared to spend the next five months in SD while she matured in the hospital enough to the point where she could be taken home.
Then day 18 rolled around. Danika's blood pressure kept lowering and they had to keep giving her more and more medication to keep it up. The NICU doctor that was on for that night had set up camp next to her to keep and eye on her. John and I set up camp and Sat there with her from 8pm on. I started to panic every time her heart rate and blood pressure would lower and by 2am I was in a full on, needing medical attention panic attack. All I could do was sit there and cry and pray that she made it through the night. Around 3am the NICU doctor told me to go to the ER because of the panic attack and I was taken right in because they had called the ER ahead of time to let them know I was coming down. I got a shot of something to calm me down and I headed back up to the NICU. Around 4:30am Danika was stable and hadn't had any incidents of crashing in the last hour, so I had faith that she was stabilizing and had just had a rough night. John and I decided to go back to my dads to get a couple hours of sleep and we would be back at the hospital around 8am to be back by her side. They offered us a family room that had a bed in it so we could be close by, but I said that she was going to be fine and that we would be back in the morning.
We woke up in the morning around 8:30 and noticed that we both had voice mails but we didn't have any missed calls. So John checked his voice mail. He started crying. I knew that Danika had passed away. I started crying and freaking out. John took my phone and erased all of the voice messages that were left for me because he knew I wouldn't be able to handle hearing them.
Danika had passed away at 6:33am, just a mere hour and a half after we left her. I was mad at myself for not staying in the family room. I think that she was holding on until we left because she didn't want to see our pain as she passed away. Her blood pressure kept lowering and there was nothing they could do for her, she passed away peacefully and not in any sort of pain. They gave her morphine when she kept crashing to calm her down. Her little body couldn't handle the world any more. I know that it wasn't because her spirit gave up, because even though she was tiny she had attitude. She would scrunch her entire forehead up to open her eyes when we would talk to her and she would squeeze our fingers when we spoke to her. She had plenty of spirit, her body just put too much effort into surviving the first two weeks that it couldn't handle going on any longer.
We had a memorial for her at my church in Poway. Johns mom and dad flew down from Minnesota and his sister and her husband came out to see us. Since then my life has been in a fog and I know it has to do with the medication I am taking. Danika's due date is coming up next weekend and I am choosing to remain in the fog for the next week and once I get past her due date I am going to come off the medication and get to a therapist and face the demons that have come out of this.
I know that everything happens for a reason, it's just hard for me to understand why this happened when it did. There was nothing that I could have done to prevent it, it wasn't my fault. Maybe Danika wasn't supposed to be here yet, maybe her passing was an act of mercy rather than malice. In any case I know that she is in good hands now, she was loved and continues to be loved more than life it's self and will forever be remembered. She changed my life as well as many other peoples lives and in the end of it all ended up being a miracle and blessing.
Someday I will have another child and that child will get all of the love that I can't give Danika. I know that one day I will make a wonderful mother, I did everything that I could in the short time I was given with her. I loved her more than I knew was possible and even though I don't always feel it, I proved to myself that I am so much stronger than I ever thought possible. I am a fighter. I've proven that. I will always have faith that my season will change and eventually I will be able to celebrate her life.
It was the morning of May 7th, and I woke up with back pain that the strongest of medications wasn't even touching and I was occasionally feeling what I was thinking to be contractions. I had never gone through contractions before, but what was happening is what I figured they would be feeling like. For about a half hour I thought about what I was going to do. I had to decide if I was going to tell my nurse what was happening or if I was going to attempt to hide it for just two more days. I wanted Danika to make it to 24 weeks and I was willing to sacrifice my life in order to get her to the age that gave her greater odds of survival, since every day that she stayed inside gave her that much more hope, that much greater chance of survival. After going back and forth in my head about this, I decided to err on the side of better judgment and tell the nurse what was happening.
I told the nurse, who called the attending, who poked at my uterus, it was tender and sore so told me that I had started to go septic. They called a lab tech to come up and take blood to check my white cell count and less than an hour later it was confirmed that I was going septic and today was going to be the day that I had been dreading. I was going to be delivering. I had no say in the matter. I called John to tell him what was happening and to tell him that he needed to get on a plane back to San Diego, he called one of my best friends Dan and asked Dan to come sit with me until John got into town. Dan got to the hospital shortly after 10am, and by this time I realise that it would have been impossible for me to hide what was going on for two more days because I was having contractions every half hour or so, and it felt like my body was being ripped in half.
Dan and I tried our hardest to stay calm, I was off and on the phone with John while he booked a plane ticket and at some point I think it was either me or John that called my dad to tell him what was happening. I had spoken to Johns mom in the morning and through tears and gasps of air I told her what was happening, Danika was going to make her way into the world today. Dan did an amazing job of keeping me calm and would hold my had through the hard parts and kept me laughing during the easier parts. If Dan had not been there, I'm not really sure what I would have done.
Shortly after they got back my lab results and as the contractions started getting more frequent, they decided that it was time to move me down from the antepardom ward down to labor and delivery and get me set up to get an epidural and get set up to start getting the pictocin to start the contractions. During this time I found out that John was going to be getting in around 2:30 and my dad was going to be leaving work. They moved me down to the labor and delivery ward and Dan did what he does best, he kept me laughing despite the fact that I felt my entire world was crashing down around me. Dan offered to go pick up John from the airport and about the time that Dan left, my dad got there and was freaking out. I love my dad, but he didn't help the situation any.
I told the nurse that I wanted pain control and I wanted it now, because I felt like I was being ripped in half with each contraction and they were becoming more and more frequent even without getting the medication to induce me yet. It was happening on it's own, I had no choice. Just about the time that Dan left to go get John is when the doctors came in to do my epidural. When they were getting that set up, the IV that I had in my left arm had infused, so they needed to put in another IV to administer the pictocin and any other medications I may need. Here is where a problem came in, I have hypotension and tiny veins, so getting an IV in me proves to be extremely difficult. I had nurses poking me multiple times in each arm in an attempt to get an IV in me, each time they failed made it that much harder for them to try again and it was stressing me out which was causing my heart rate and Danikas heart rates to go into scary ranges.
Finally they are ready to get the epidural in me and instead of having an attending putting the epidural in, they had a resident working on me. I understand that UCSD medical center is a teaching hospital, but having a resident working on someone who is going septic and they are showing that there is fetal distress is not the right thing to do. Anyway, the resident attempted to get the epidural in me. Six times. One time she hit a bone, she was going through muscle and ligaments and stuff that HURT when they are being poked with the giant epidural needle. This was the only part of my entire labor and delivery that I was actually screaming, because every time they pulled the needle out and stuck it back in again I felt like I was either going to pass out or hit someone. I flinched really bad when she hit one of my bones and they yelled at me that I can't flinch when they are working that close to my spinal cord and I told them that if they weren't hitting bones then I wouldn't be screaming and flinching. John got to the hospital around 3:00, and walked in during this all happening. The nurse that was working on my left arm finally got an IV in. The attending finally pulled the resident off of me and a minute later my epidural was in and being taped to my back. I was terrified that I was going to move in bed wrong and pull out the catheter, but it was taped extremely well. Thank God.
Once the epidural was in and the IV was in and I got settled, my dad and Dan joined John and I in the room as they started giving me the medication for the epidural. At first the dose they gave me didn't work so they had to come back and give me a bigger dose. About a minute and a half after they gave me the second huge dose I was looking at the guys and told them that I didn't feel good. I told them that I felt like I was going to puke and that I needed the nurse. From talking to my dad, John and Dan they said that when I said this, I went from being my normal color to grey to blue in a matter of seconds. I was crashing. They ran in and took my blood pressure and it was 35/20. My heart rate was dropping and Danikas heart rate was dropping, I was dying. They ran in and pushed a bunch of epinephrine into my IV to get my heart rate and blood pressure back up and for a few minutes it was very touch and go. They were discussing if they should just do an emergency c-section or if they should continue to try to have me have a natural birth. The decision was made to continue on the course of the pictocin and see how Danika and I did with it. About 5:30pm they started me on the pictocin and within a few minutes I started getting stronger contractions. Slowly the first dose of medication they gave me in my epidural started wearing off and I was feeling every contraction, every couple of minutes. With each contraction, my blood pressure would lower to an unsafe range and Danika would show that she was in distress.
At 7:30 they took me off the pictocin and said they were trying to decide if they were going to do a c-section. They kept running in with an ultra sound machine to check on Danika because they kept losing her heart rate and my blood pressure was constantly at a very low, very unsafe level. I finally told the nurse that I needed more medication in my epidural because what they were giving me just wasn't cutting it. I was crying because I felt so bad, I kept telling them that every contraction I was hurting her and I wasn't even trying to. I felt so guilty that I was hurting her. The doctors came back in and gave me another huge dose of the epidural medication and we went through the process of having to give me epinephrine again to keep my heart rate and blood pressure up. A few minutes later the bottom half of my body was completely numb, so I was no longer feeling the contractions but I know that they were still happening because they kept losing Danikas heart rate. Once I was numb I was really tired and was having a hard time staying awake, this was all around 10pm or so.
About 10:10 they ran in again with the ultrasound machine because they had completely lost Danika. The doctors decided to check to see how dilated I was, and I was at 5cm, which is all I needed to be, so it was go time. They handed John this suit to put on and all the stuff to cover up with because I was going to be delivering in an operating room in case something went wrong and they needed to do surgery. I started to freak out, and then I started to shiver and my heart rate kept dropping once I was in the OR. They told me to move myself from the labor bed to the operating table, with my body half numb, but I needed to make sure that I didn't push at all. I started crying and told them that I couldn't do that. I had no strength. I was ready to give up.
Somehow I managed to get onto the operating table and I started freaking out because I thought that I was going to fall off and I was freezing. My hands were like ice because of what was going on with my blood pressure. I think once I was in the operating room there was one more discussion of whether or not they wanted to do a c-section and they decided that I didn't need a c-section. So they got me ready to push.
They told me to push, I pushed and Danika came out in one push. Danika had arrived into the world at 10:32 pm, and just as quickly as she was born she was swept away by the NICU doctors. I continued to lay on the operating table while they tried to get my placenta to detach. After pushing on me and doing various other things, they told me they had gotten 90% of it out and that the other 10% should pass on it's own. There were doctors in the OR talking about how they could tell from just looking at my placenta that it was infected and that they were going to be passing samples of it to this doctor who is the leader in researching placenta related things. In the morning I had been started on the strongest antibiotics that they could give me at the time and they told me that I was going to be in the hospital for a while longer to finish the course of antibiotics to fight off the sepsis.
About midnight I finally emerged from the operating room and was moved back to the labor room I had been in earlier and was greeted by my dad and Dan. Texts and calls were being placed to family and friends to let everyone know that she had been born and that she was doing well, all things considered. A little bit after I got back the NICU doctors and the OB doctors came in to talk to me. John was allowed to go see Danika and take pictures of her, I was told that I could see her as soon as I could stand up, walk and go to the bathroom. That was what was required of me in order to be moved back to the ward I was in before. The NICU doctors told us that Danika had a few major hurdles to handle and that if she was able to make it past them then she had a greater chance of survival. Her major hurdles were 24 hours, 72 hours and 2 weeks.
When she came out she was trying to breathe and trying to cry and she was kicking and moving around. I felt her kick my leg before they took her. They came back a few minutes later to show us the umbilical cord that had a perfect knot in it and tell us that she had been intubated and was doing well.
Now it was time to rest until the epidural wore off so I could stand and go to the bathroom. About 1am I was able to do that, while not completely stable on my feet, I was able to get up and walk which amazed the doctors. I kept telling the nurse I wanted to go to the NICU to meet my daughter and I was told that I would be wheeled there on the way to my room in the ward upstairs. John came back and showed me pictures of her and all I could really do was cry was because she was so small. She wasn't ready to come out into the world yet, I felt like I had let her down. Dan and my dad left for a little bit to get something to eat since the cafe was open until 2am.
Finally around 4am I was wheeled to the NICU to meet my daughter for the first time. I cried because she was so small. I cried because she was so beautiful. I cried because she was a little miracle that was defying odds. I cried because for the first time in my life I understood complete and unconditional love that happened in an instant. I cried because I couldn't hold her and I couldn't give her the kiss I wanted to. I cried because I became a mother 16 weeks early and I was completely overwhelmed. I can't remember if Dan got to meet her that night or not. I know he met her at one point when he brought me a quilt from his church for her isolator, but I was started to get delirious.
After Danika and I met, I was moved back up to the room where I had been earlier in the day, seeing all the same nurses that I had seen for the past few weeks that I was in the hospital. After I got settled I said bye to Dan and thanked him for being so amazing my time of need. I said bye to my dad and said goodnight to John. I had to keep asking for pain medication because my back was all kinds of screwed up because of them messing my epidural up. I could barely stand. I could barely walk.
The next morning I wanted to see Danika as soon as I woke up, so I got myself ready and I was wheeled down to see her. While I was standing next to her isolator I started getting light headed and almost passed out so I was told that I needed to go back up to my room. But Danika was doing fabulous. She was breathing on her own, she was breathing room air. She was getting medication because her blood pressure was low and she had a couple of blood transfusions. They had put an IV in her and she had an umbilical line for various things that they were giving her. She was under photo therapy lights because she had jaundice, but overall she was doing good. I was told to go rest and come back and see her later.
I was in the hospital for a week after she was born fighting off the sepsis. I spent my first mothers day in the hospital. I went to see her when I was allowed, though I never really stayed more than an hour or so because the NICU freaked me out and the longer I was there the more and more anxious I would get and I would end up having a panic attack when I left.
When she was around 4 days old I had gone to visit her and not called first and walked in on a group of doctors all standing around her with like four or five nurses. Danika had decided to pull out her IV and PIC line, so they were trying to decide what to do to give her the medication to keep her blood pressure up, so they decided to give her steroids via her umbilical line. They were going to wait a day to let her skin mature just a little bit more, because every time they touched her or held onto her skin too long it would start to break down because it's not mature enough to be touched yet.
For the most part she did fabulous. She was the talk of the hospital and the doctors were all amazed at how well she was doing. Once she reached two weeks I calmed down some and was prepared to spend the next five months in SD while she matured in the hospital enough to the point where she could be taken home.
Then day 18 rolled around. Danika's blood pressure kept lowering and they had to keep giving her more and more medication to keep it up. The NICU doctor that was on for that night had set up camp next to her to keep and eye on her. John and I set up camp and Sat there with her from 8pm on. I started to panic every time her heart rate and blood pressure would lower and by 2am I was in a full on, needing medical attention panic attack. All I could do was sit there and cry and pray that she made it through the night. Around 3am the NICU doctor told me to go to the ER because of the panic attack and I was taken right in because they had called the ER ahead of time to let them know I was coming down. I got a shot of something to calm me down and I headed back up to the NICU. Around 4:30am Danika was stable and hadn't had any incidents of crashing in the last hour, so I had faith that she was stabilizing and had just had a rough night. John and I decided to go back to my dads to get a couple hours of sleep and we would be back at the hospital around 8am to be back by her side. They offered us a family room that had a bed in it so we could be close by, but I said that she was going to be fine and that we would be back in the morning.
We woke up in the morning around 8:30 and noticed that we both had voice mails but we didn't have any missed calls. So John checked his voice mail. He started crying. I knew that Danika had passed away. I started crying and freaking out. John took my phone and erased all of the voice messages that were left for me because he knew I wouldn't be able to handle hearing them.
Danika had passed away at 6:33am, just a mere hour and a half after we left her. I was mad at myself for not staying in the family room. I think that she was holding on until we left because she didn't want to see our pain as she passed away. Her blood pressure kept lowering and there was nothing they could do for her, she passed away peacefully and not in any sort of pain. They gave her morphine when she kept crashing to calm her down. Her little body couldn't handle the world any more. I know that it wasn't because her spirit gave up, because even though she was tiny she had attitude. She would scrunch her entire forehead up to open her eyes when we would talk to her and she would squeeze our fingers when we spoke to her. She had plenty of spirit, her body just put too much effort into surviving the first two weeks that it couldn't handle going on any longer.
We had a memorial for her at my church in Poway. Johns mom and dad flew down from Minnesota and his sister and her husband came out to see us. Since then my life has been in a fog and I know it has to do with the medication I am taking. Danika's due date is coming up next weekend and I am choosing to remain in the fog for the next week and once I get past her due date I am going to come off the medication and get to a therapist and face the demons that have come out of this.
I know that everything happens for a reason, it's just hard for me to understand why this happened when it did. There was nothing that I could have done to prevent it, it wasn't my fault. Maybe Danika wasn't supposed to be here yet, maybe her passing was an act of mercy rather than malice. In any case I know that she is in good hands now, she was loved and continues to be loved more than life it's self and will forever be remembered. She changed my life as well as many other peoples lives and in the end of it all ended up being a miracle and blessing.
Someday I will have another child and that child will get all of the love that I can't give Danika. I know that one day I will make a wonderful mother, I did everything that I could in the short time I was given with her. I loved her more than I knew was possible and even though I don't always feel it, I proved to myself that I am so much stronger than I ever thought possible. I am a fighter. I've proven that. I will always have faith that my season will change and eventually I will be able to celebrate her life.