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Old 07-18-08, 06:50 AM   #12 (permalink)
Layla_Z
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Re: Premature Birth Linked to Some Unexpected Later Problems

Quote:
Originally Posted by 1069 View Post
My younger son was nearly as premature as your daughter. He almost died a couple of times during his first year; had to have some surgery.
Once, just when I thought we were out of the woods medically speaking, I found him blue in his crib. He was in the PediICU for two weeks that time, while they tried to ascertain whether there was brain damage, and what the extent of it was.
Turned out, there was none. It was a miracle; I had discovered him almost immediately, apparently, after he stopped breathing. A commonplace, mundane miracle, as it turned out: one of the doctors at the hospital told me that this is common. Mothers will often sense that their babies have stopped breathing, even if they're in another room, and find them in time.
He had to be on an apnea monitor for awhile after that, but it never happened again.
By the time he was eighteen months, he was healthy; developmentally, he was on par. He never had another health problem in his life to date.
When he was six- like your daughter- I believed, like you, that he had no lasting effects.
I was correct only from a technical standpoint; nothing medically diagnosable was wrong with him.
I have an older son, too, who was born at term.
I see the difference every day of my life.

I don't know who you are, and don't care whether my words offend you.
Protecting the sensibilities of strangers is not one of my priorities.
If my words scare you, I'm sorry you're scared.
If they don't, I'm glad they don't. You're lucky if your daughter is unscathed, although I suspect it's too soon to know.

Somewhere in all this, there's a syndrome that hasn't been named yet; these children need services. What these services would consist of, I cannot imagine. I only know that they need them. Some form of early intervention.
It seems to me- and this is only the wild, instinctive guess of an uneducated person- that the problem might be with their nervous systems. Some problem so subtle that current technology can not yet detected it.

My daughter had some rough moments at first as well. She was in the hospital for 4 months and was on oxygen for 2 months after coming home. She was on a pulse/oxy monitor a couple more months after that. Once she came home she was fine but while in the hospital she was on a respirator then taken off, then had to be put back on.

I'm not offended by the idea that she might have trouble because of her maturity. You never know what will happen with kids. Early intervention has help her greatly. She was released from services (they thought she was "caught up" developmentally) when she was 2.5. On a side note, the program that helped her, along with all young children with developmental delays was one of the first programs targeted for cuts by our republican governor. There was such an uproar that he backed down.
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