Fourteen years ago...

[halo79rn]

awww. Happy Birthday, Rebecca!

[pld0804]

What a happy story! Happy Birthday Rebecca!

[mkvh]

Happy birthday Rebecca!!!

Our pre-e babies share a birthday--mine turned 3. I did really well emotionally this year till I read your post. :)

[denise]

Happy Birthday Rebecca!!

[josiah1112]

Congratulations on your beautiful girl!!She is truly a miracle!May she have a wonderful birthday.

[mnmom]

Happy birthday, Rebecca. I can totally relate, even though my two girls weren't Pre E babies. Time flies, doesn't it? Ah, AP classes! Good Luck! I think history, Spanish and Chem received the most tears and frustration in this house!

[suleaf]

HAppy BIRTHDAY Rebecca! Thank you for sharing that story.... it's a happy and beautiful one!

[patty]

Wow You had a really rough road back then. I am glad to hear it all had a happy ending. My first pre-e baby turned 14 last month and I still remember his birth like it was yesterday. Time flies. Happy Birthday Rebecca.

[audrey s.]

...I was in the hospital at the end of a long week of hospital bedrest, at about 37 weeks. I had labile pressures, off-the-chart reflexes, claudication (where the arteries in my legs were spasming so bad I literally could not walk without screaming in pain) and I was living on Vicodin, and my protein was in the thousands. After weekly amnios for lung maturity, we finally got the go-ahead to induce, and they started induction July 11th. It took until July 12, three hours of pushing, a crash c-section with a VERY blue baby (she got a first Apgar of 2, my DH, a NICU therapist, thought they were being "generous"), liver and kidney failure AFTER the delivery, and a whole lot of tsouris. At two days of age, they came to tell us that she had necrotizing enterocolitis -- rare but not unheard of in a "full-term" pre-eclamptic baby, and she had her entire colon removed emergently that night. Seven weeks in the NICU, two surgeries (second one to remove the bag and connect her intestines up again), and a re-admission one day after discharge for meningitis, another week in PICU this time...

And my "baby" is turning 14 on Sunday! She's an honor student, entering high school, assigned to five honors classes (and I'm nervous about the homework load), has 553 "friends" on Facebook, is almost as tall as I am, steals my clothes (she prefers stuff from the vintage stores), and is surviving, thriving, and your basic healthy, happy, BUSY teen.

I still have some struggles from that pregnancy...but the teen years happen far more quickly than I would have EVER dreamed possible! Just had to share...