WLSU: Ordinary Miracles

Hi friends. As you may know, I am currently on sabbatical and we'll be out until August 11th. Throughout my time off we have a couple new episodes that I recorded prior to leaving that are related to my sabbatical journey. We will also rerun a couple of previous episodes that are connected to the ongoing theme of transformation and best of all.

Thanks for listening.

This blog is also available as a podcast

The only symptom of pre-eclampsia that I knew of was swollen ankles, and my ankles were fine. I was 25 weeks pregnant, and running late to my follow-up ultrasound appointment…late enough that I almost skipped it. I had figured that the headaches and occasional blurry vision I experienced were probably related to the stress of my first year of teaching. I didn’t realize that those were signs of a problem with my pregnancy. My husband John had to work late that day, so I went to the doctor’s appointment by myself. I figured that it would be routine. I was thinking about what I would make for dinner that night. I didn’t notice until later that the ultrasound technician was far less talkative than he had been during my last appointment, 6 weeks prior.

By the time I opened the door afterward to return to the consult room, the technician had pulled my obstetrician from a delivery. The doctor was standing in the doorway in his blue surgical scrubs. He told me that the ultrasound showed that I had severe pre-eclampsia. He said that there was a 100 percent chance that my baby would be born premature. He said that I was in danger of having a stroke, and that the wait would be too long for an ambulance to take me to the hospital, so his nurse was going to drive me. Then he asked me to sit down so that he could check my blood pressure. It was…high.

For the next ten days, I was on monitored bed rest at the state teaching hospital. I underwent treatment to prevent a stroke, and received two rounds of a steroid to develop the baby’s lungs. After ten days, when my blood pressure rose to a dangerous level and stayed there, and the baby was showing signs of distress, the doctors delivered her. Our daughter Katherine Grace was born at 27 weeks’ gestation. She was twelve inches long. She weighed one pound, four ounces.

I was released from the hospital a few days after her birth, and John had to go back to work shortly after that. Our house was about an hour from the hospital where Katherine Grace was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, but John’s parents lived just 15 minutes away. So we moved in with them, for the next 73 days.

People would ask me, afterwards, how I experienced Jesus through that time. What I knew was how to put my right foot in front of my left, and take a breath, and then put my left foot in front of my right one, and breathe again. I knew how to get myself up, and go to the hospital, and hold my daughter, and talk to the doctors and nurses, and go back to John’s parents’ house, and sleep, and do it all over again the next day. And love showed up by people taking care of every single other thing in our life, so that we could keep doing those things that only we could do. That’s how I experienced Jesus through that time…in the community that surrounded us and helped hold us together so that we could take our next breath, our next step.

John’s parents walked our dogs and did our laundry and put gas in our car and made sure that we had food to eat before he went to work, and I went to the hospital, each day. They were ready to talk when we needed to, and glad to give me space when it had been a hard day in the NICU. My family lived farther away, but they visited often. Our friends and our church enfolded us. They loved us in practical, tangible ways: by giving us money to buy food at the hospital cafeteria, by making blankets to wrap our daughter in, by knitting tiny hats – using a lemon as a form, because that’s how small her head was – that would help Katherine Grace stay warm as we held her. Along the way, I think everyone I knew, and very many people I didn’t, were all praying for her. For months…for years…after she was born, people wrote to me or came up to me in person to say that our daughter had been on their church’s prayer list, and in their personal prayers as well.

My own prayer through that season was a continuing, adrenaline-filled plea of Help: Help my daughter remember to breathe (apnea of prematurity is a condition where babies born before 32 weeks’ gestation have extended pauses in their breathing). Help her to gain weight this week. Help her brain scan to be clear. Help her to grow. Help her to be alright. Help her to come home.

Some of the babies who were in that NICU with us did not live to go home. I am certain their parents and families and churches and friends prayed every bit as fiercely as ours did, and I grieve the loss they suffered. I trust that love showed up for them in the midst of astonishing heartbreak. I pray that it did, that it does.

Katherine Grace was the tiniest baby that hospital had ever sent home, weighing three pounds, five ounces. She had almost tripled her birth weight – she seemed huge to John and me! We had to find a specially-adapted car seat that could keep her safe for the drive back to our house, a drive we made with fear and trembling in that first time alone with our baby after two and a half long months.

Love kept showing up, in practical and tangible ways, through the months and years that followed, with the community that had known her since she was born, and with those who have joined our circle since then.

Now 26 years later, our Katherine Grace is living in Germany, married to her college sweetheart. Love continues to show up, shaping our lives in the everyday transformations that I hope I never take for granted: a phone call, most mornings; comparisons of the recipes we’ve cooked together, or plan to; a discussion of the exams she’s preparing for; the sweater pattern she is planning for her next knitting project. Sure, we have had dramatic moments in our lives, for both good and ill. But those are not the moments I hold most dear. It's the quick “I love you” before we hang up the phone, the goofy text messages, the corrections to my Duolingo intro-level German. Those ordinary miracles are the ones I cherish, with gratitude.