Miracle Baby!

Bonnie H was told she wouldn’t live past age eighteen. She was also told she could never have children. Here is the harrowing story of her first labor and delivery -- Bonnie's own mother was a beast!

By Bonnie H

My birth story, ironically, started on Labor Day in 1986. It happened that HE and I were at a big family thing, with HIS family. They didn’t like me but they tolerated me.

I started contractions that day. A few hours later, I was admitted to the hospital. I spent a couple days getting IV fluid and a small dose of magnesium sulfate to stop the contractions, as my due date was still more than two months away.

My obstetrician, Dr. H, put me on bed rest.

So I puttered. I rested.

Bonnie H’s first baby — and her second and her third — were all miracle babies, as doctors had told her mother that Bonnie would never have children!

The first week of October, contractions hit again. This time they were more serious. I was in the hospital for four days with more meds. Then an amniocentesis. Neonatologist said baby needed two more weeks. Labor stopped so I went back home to rest. Then I started throwing up again -- I was having a reaction to the magnesium sulfate.

October 19th was my one-year anniversary being together with HIM. By that point, we were engaged. Dr. H said I could go fishing with HIM (I hate fishing) and then we were supposed to go out to dinner that night.

So we went fishing. I had my legs propped up by the side of the lake and was eating the canned corn HE had brought for bait. After some time went by, we went home. We were living at my mother’s house.

We got ready to go to some new restaurant I had a coupon for. That’s the only time in my life I had prime rib. I liked the baked potato best.

When I got home that evening, my mother was pissy, making rude comments about us going out. How “it must be nice to have money.” She knew full well we had saved for weeks. But she was in a nasty mood so we just went up to our room.

Next morning, October 20, 1986, I woke up feeling not right. Kind of crampy. I called the doctor right away. Meanwhile, my mother was downstairs making loud obnoxious comments about us lying in bed all day -- acting like animals.

Dr H said I was quite probably going into labor again. I made HIM go to school anyway. HE arranged to borrow his father’s truck just in case I needed to go to the hospital.

I went downstairs and tried telling Ma what was going on. She was complaining about how busy she was making grape jelly. She said she had to go out with my oldest sister and that she would be back and that I needed to help her put wax on the jars.

So, I spent some hours standing in the kitchen spooning melted wax on her damn jelly. Pains were coming every five to eight minutes. This labor business didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Here I was in labor and yet, Dr. H knew that I wouldn’t be able to dilate because of the arthritis.

Ma came back from her “thing” with my sister and started complaining because I was sitting down. I was eating leftovers from my prime rib dinner. She told me how ignorant I was that I was eating.

I ignored her. Dr. H had told me that I could eat. After all, I weighed 63 pounds when I got pregnant. That day, I weighed 85 pounds.

Shortly afterward, HE got home with HIS father’s truck. Ma flipped out, screaming at HIM for parking out front.

That’s when I started vomiting blood. Ma cussed both of us out. I called Dr. H for the fifth time that day and he told me to go right to the maternity ward and he would meet me there. My mother pounded on the apartment next door, where another of my sisters lived with her family. Ma told my brother-in-law that he needed to take me to the hospital. Which in fact he did not.

Ma screamed at me and my partner again, telling HIM to move his GD truck out of the way.

I said “NO, Ma. I’m getting in the truck. HE is driving me. End of discussion.”

We got there very quickly. As promised, Dr. H was waiting for me on the maternity floor. I was in bed and hooked up to monitors in record time. Baby was looking good. I on the other had was not. For the third time that afternoon, I vomited blood. I blamed myself. Surely, I had done something to cause this.

But I was wrong. I was getting IV meds to stop the labor and Dr. H said that the medication was likely the cause of the bleeding.

I was left to rest for a while. HE was with me. Labor pains kept coming, like a slow-moving earthquake radiating inside me until my whole body was shaking.

A few hours later, Ma walked in with my oldest sister. Ma felt like a dark presence. Full of anger. I told them about the vomiting. Ma said it was my fault for having eaten six hours earlier.

She then had the audacity to push some papers in front of my face. She told me to sign them, now! I asked what it was. I had already been admitted and she had nothing to do with that or anything else.

She repeated herself more loudly. “Sign them, now!” Like I hadn’t heard her.

HE said “we’re not signing anything that we don’t read.”

Ma replied, “not you, just her. She needs to sign.” My sister, speaking quietly, said it was a legal document, stating that if I died, Ma would take my baby.

I couldn’t believe my ears. “What?!” I barked. “You want to do what? Baby has a father. Absolutely not!”

HE got loud then and asked Ma, “what the hell are you thinking?”

Ma got loud then too and started swearing at me and calling me filthy names. The nurses heard the commotion and two of them came in to check. My monitors were going crazy. I was vomiting.

HE was yelling back. I told the nurse to make them leave. Immediately.

So the nurses told Ma and my sister they had to go.

Ma started yelling at them too.

As the nurse ushered them out, Ma was still yelling and swearing. Not 30 minutes later, my cousin B knocked on the door. He was in the hospital because his own baby was in the NICU. Cousin B hugged me. Shook hands with HIM, and told us it was my mother who had summoned him out of the nursery from the bedside of his own baby to come in and “talk sense to me,” in other words, to convince me to sign those papers giving up my baby to her.

Cousin B wasn’t nasty. In fact, he kind of chuckled when he asked “Bonnie, what have you done now?” He had always teased me about being a troublemaker. HE filled Cousin B in on what was happening with Ma since I was occupied with more pain twisting my insides.

My cousin hugged me and said he would take care of things with my mother. Then he turned to HIM and said, “don’t ever give me reason to look for you.” He left.

*******

Time passes strangely in a hospital. Hours can be minutes and minutes can be hours.

Dr. H came back to check on me. He could see that my labor was not going to stop this time. Baby was still five weeks early. I was so sick. He said, “Let’s have a baby.”

“Now?” I asked. He said the nurse would be right in to prep me. And because I’m a glutton for punishment, I called Ma. She said she was sleeping and told me to call back later.

The nursed whisked me away. I asked for HIM and was told they would bring HIM in soon. The epidural hit me like a hammer to the head. When I opened my eyes, I was fully draped for surgery and HE was standing next to me.

Dr. H was telling HIM to stand and look. My eyes took a few minutes to focus. When they did, the most beautiful miracle was looking back at me. My baby. My beautiful perfect baby girl. My last words before darkness were “I’m going to be sick.”

Five hours later, I woke up in recovery. Disoriented and alone. The nurse heard and came over. She said my baby was in the nursery. “She’s little but doing well.” HE was with her.

Dr. H came in soon after and said baby and me were both fine. “You did have a seizure in the OR, Bonnie, but that was from so much stress.”

I put that aside. Because I had done it.

I had my miracle baby!

Bonnie H, an author who lives in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, is writing a memoir called Trauma Drama.

“Miracle Baby” is the third installment in this project. At age two, Bonnie contracted juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but no one knew how to treat the autoimmune disease properly in those days. Bonnie never saw a rheumatologist. A local public health nurse specifically told Bonnie’s mother to bring her to Shriners Hospital for Children in Springfield but Bonnie’s mother, Rose, refused, saying it was waste of time. Bonnie’s mother chose to let orthopedists in Pittsfield, MA basically experiment on her child.

The three sets of tractions the doctors performed on Bonnie when she was only four or five years old were absolutely torturous, and worst of all, they didn’t work. In fact, the tractions accelerated the damage to Bonnie’s joints, to the point that, when she was 25 years old, a doctor told her that she had the bones of someone in her 60s.

Today, Bonnie H — the H in my mind stands for HERO and for HOPE — is 62 years young, having survived a lifetime of agonizing physical pain and emotional abuse that few people could endure. Bonnie’s story is one of the most inspiring I’ve ever heard, and Bonnie herself is an unbelievably courageous woman, as well as a gifted storyteller and writer.

One amazing coincidence — and only one of the incredible connections that Bonnie and I have discovered we share: I had my second baby almost exactly the same day as Bonnie did, in the very same hospital where she suffered so much in labor and delivery.

Stay tuned for more of Bonnie’s story!