Under normal circumstances, the odds of survival for a baby
born at 23 weeks are slim: Around 30 percent, according to some doctors. Just
15 percent, say others.
But under the circumstances in which Haiden Morgan was born on a cruise ship
more than 100 miles from land, with no obstetrician, no incubator and 14 hours
to reach the nearest hospital? He had practically no chance.
“The doctors really tell us that he’s a miracle baby,”
Haiden’s mother, Emily Morgan of Ogden, Utah, told The Washington Post. “It’s a
miracle he’s here.”
She hadn’t expected to need a miracle when she, her husband
and their 3-year-old daughter boarded a Royal Caribbean 7 day cruise in
August. She was only five months pregnant at the time, and her doctor had
approved the trip.
But on her second night at sea, amid motion of the waves and the hum of ship
machinery, the contractions started but she thought it would go away. However,
after 4 hours she started to bleed.
They called down to the medical unit, and Emily Morgan was brought over in a
wheelchair.
“I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t really comprehend
how wrong. I didn’t think about what the possibilities were. All I knew was I
was going to have a baby,” she said.
She said: “I was naive. I didn’t understand what was
going to happen from there. … I didn’t realize that there were going to be
complications, and there were going to be problems, and we were a long way out
at sea. All of that unfolded as we went along.”
In the medical center, a nurse assessed Emily
Morgan, who called the ship Doctor who confirmed she was in labour
and the doctor warned her that the ship’s medical unit was ill-equipped to
deliver such a severely premature infant. And Puerto Rico, the nearest land,
was a long way off yet.
‘Don’t push, don’t do anything,’ they told me,” she
recalled. “And I said, ‘I can tell these are contractions. I’m going to have
this baby. I have to push.’ ”
Less than an hour later, at 1:56 a.m. on Sept. 1st, her son
was born.
Immediately, the preemie baby was whisked away by a doctor. Emily Morgan, who
still had to deliver the placenta, was in some danger herself. The ship-board
medical unit didn’t even have clamps to cut her umbilical cord. She had lost a
great deal of blood.
“I remember I told them, ‘I want to see my son,’ ” she said.
The doctor and nurses soothed her, told her they needed to focus on her for
now. At one point, a doctor told her that she had miscarried.
“I want to see him, I don’t care if he’s dead,” she recalls
pleading. Then she turned to her husband: “I’m not having any more kids,” she
told him. “I’m done. I’m not going through this again.”
But a short while later, the doctors returned. Their son was
alive, they said. Tiny and fragile and struggling to breathe, but still alive.
For how much longer, though, the doctors weren’t optimistic. If the baby
stopped breathing at any point, it was their policy not to resuscitate. 24
weeks is usually considered the limit of viability for premature newborns.
The exhausted parents were taken to another room, where their newborn son
lay swaddled in towels. An oxygen mask was strapped to the side of his face.
Emily Morgan marveled at his tiny features, his bright pink skin, his feeble
little cry. They were good signs, she knew, evidence that his lungs were strong
and that his immature, 0.7kg body was perhaps up to the challenge ahead.
She isn’t sure why she was initially told she had miscarried, though she
believes the doctor’s intentions were good.
“Maybe because they weren’t equipped … and they really
didn’t think he would live, and they didn’t want me to be overwhelmed,” she
said. “I do believe she really felt like I had miscarried and that he wasn’t
going to make it.”
Initially, the Morgans were told that they couldn’t stay
with their son, and Emily Morgan was sent back to her room.The doctors didn’t
think he would live through the night. But she refused to believe it.
“They had told me that once, and he was still alive. It lit
a fire,” she said. “If he can make it so many hours then I will do what I can
to help him stay alive. If he wants to be here, we’ll make it so.”
After about half an hour, she and her husband returned to
their son’s room and laid down beside his tiny, towel-wrapped form, dwarfed by
the adult-sized bed.
For the moment, they called him Baby Boy Morgan. “We love you, Baby Boy,” they
said. “We love you.
All night, the couple devoted themselves to keeping the
infant alive. He was so fragile he could barely be handled-at 23 weeks, a
baby’s skin is insubstantial and paper thin, his nerves so close to the surface
that the slightest stroke can be painful. But they did their best. When Baby
Boy’s towels were wet, they wrapped him in new ones. When it seemed he was
losing too much heat through his head, they found a maxi pad to cover it and
keep him warm. Every 90 minutes, Emily microwaved saline pouches to stuff into
his wrappings, a makeshift incubator.
In the morning, the ship’s captain called down to check on how the Morgans were
doing and let them know that the ship was speeding to shore. Over the phone, he
heard Baby Boy’s weak cry, more whimper than wail.
“He’s alive?” the captain asked, startled.
“He is.”
He said. Okay.
“He told me they were going as fast as we can, and we were
going to get there two hours earlier,” Emily Morgan recalled. “And then I
thought, well, two hours isn’t really a big difference.”
But as the morning ticked by, dark spots signs of
hypothermia began to appear on the little boy’s fingers and toes. His body was
losing heat, fast, and he needed to be in a real intensive care unit, with a
real incubator.
In the end, being two hours early might have saved the baby’s life.
The ship docked in Puerto Rico around 2 p.m., and an hour later the Morgan
family was being rushed to the hospital.
After three days in the Puerto Rican neonatal intensive care unit, Baby Boy was
healthy enough to be transferred to a hospital in Miami. Now that they were
closer to home, the Morgans felt comfortable giving him a name.
Haiden has been at the hospital in Miami for three weeks now and will likely be
there till December which was supposed to be his original due date, and he is
still a long way from healthy.
Repeated infections and complications have kept him from putting on any weight.
He wears a respirator tube to help with his breathing and is fed breast milk
through a syringe into his stomach, just two tablespoons at a time over the
course of an hour and a half.
Their medical expenses have mounted worryingly, and they are accepting
donations through
a GoFundMe page to help pay the bills.
The Morgans are optimistic and they feel they have reason to be positive.
“We’ve hit rock bottom of not knowing what was going to
happen. We were on a cruise ship hearing he was going to die,” Emily Morgan
said. “And now he’s 24 days old and he still is fighting.”
“We can smile about that.”
Posts
