Weldon, Allison Brooke

I found out I was pregnant with my second child 3 days before Christmas after 6 long months of trying. My husband and I were so excited. We waited the 3 days to tell our families on Christmas day. I began having horrible morning sickness just a couple weeks later and that lasted until the end of April. I had been hospitalized on 3 different occasions with severe morning sickness/dehydration in March alone. I was scheduled for my first ultrasound on April 6, 2000. I was beginning to feel better from the morning sickness and my husband and I were expecting to go in there and find out what the sex was. What a shock when we found out something was wrong. The ultrasound technician told us he was going to get the doctor to come take a look and at that time I wasn't worried because they did that with my first daughter. Well, the doctor came in and started looking and looking and looking. She finally said "I know you know I was looking at something so I'm not going to just let you leave and pretend nothing's wrong." She told us she saw something wrong with the heart and lungs and she was going to call my ob to let him know about it. They didn't know it was CDH at that time. My OB called me later that evening and told me that he didn't know the significance of what the other doctor had seen and he was going to refer me to a perinatologist. I got an appointment with the perinatologist on April 10 and had a level 2 ultrasound. That was the day we received the worst news I have ever received. Our daughter had a Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia. We had no idea what CDH was and the doctor explained it and also told us that it had a high mortality rate. He advised us to get a second opinion , so we got an appointment for the next day with a group of perinatologists in Atlanta, 2 hours away from our home. I saw Dr. Korotkin in Atlanta, and he confirmed the CDH, but he gave me more hope than the first doctor did. I went to Atlanta every 2 weeks for ultrasounds. They decided I needed to deliver up there because the hospital where Allison would be is up there. In May, we flew to San Francisco, CA to look into having fetal surgery. We were turned down because Allison also had a growth on her lung and that disqualified us.

Allison was born on August 22, 2000 in Atlanta, GA. I was scheduled for an induction that morning, but Allison was ready before then. My first contraction was at 3:45 am and Allison was born at 8:45 am. All throughout my pregnancy the doctors never came right out and said it, but I knew that they didn't expect Allison to even survive. But once again, Allison had other plans. She was born in one hospital and transported to the children's hospital. The NICU team where she was born told me that she would definitely need ECMO. But the NICU at the children's hospital called us that night and said she was doing great and did not need ECMO. That was the first of the good news that just seemed to keep on coming. Don't get me wrong, she had her ups and downs, but we had expected much worse than what really happened. They had to put in a central line because she wasn't very easy to get IVs in (like her mommy!). The first obstacle was her pulmonary hypertension. They had to wait for her blood pressure to stabilize before they could do the repair. Finally, at 3 days old, Allison had her surgery to repair the diaphragm. She had her stomach, liver, intestines, and spleen up in her chest, yet she had 1/3 of a left lung! She sailed right through the surgery. She came off her ventilator at 2 weeks. The only problem she had was when they started feeding her my breast milk, it caused her chyloducts (whatever that is) to leak and her chest to fill up with fluid.

So they stopped feeding her for 2 weeks (except for her IV fluids). She had to be put on an NG tube because she couldn't suck from a bottle. Oh, when she came off the ventilator, she was what they called tachypneia, meaning she breathed really fast, like 100 breaths per minute (normal newborn rate is 40-60 bpm). That's one reason why she couldn't drink from the bottle because she couldn't get the hang of suck-swallow-breath. After about a week of trying the bottle, she started to slow down her breathing rate and she would drink a little from the bottle, but we had to put the rest through the tube. She finally came home on October 4, when she was 6 weeks, 1 day old. She came home with the NG tube, on a monitor, a feeding pump, and meds - reglan (for reflux) and prilosec (for the acid). When she had been home for 2 weeks, I stopped using the NG tube in the daytime, and just used it at night when she was on the feeding pump. I stopped using the feeding pump (and the NG tube) altogether when she was 2 1/2 months old. She had some feeding problems where she would only drink about 1 or 2 ounces at each bottle feeding when she should have been taking about 5 ounces. She is slowly working her way up to it, especially since we stopped using the NG tube. She is doing fine now, and not a day goes by that I don't thank God for allowing us to keep her. She is truly our miracle baby.

Written by Allison’s mom, Amy Weldon (Georgia)
2001