Celebration of Life: Jessica

 I have been writing about Jessica in a writer's group lately. This is one of the stories that I wrote. The events are true and happened after the year 1990.

  The realization hadn't hit me yet. I was going to have a baby!  James and I had just gotten married and I was looking for a job on our side of town.  When I wanted the car I would take James to work and keep it until it was time to go pick him up again.

  One of the days that I took James to work, I dropped him off and went and got a drink at the gas station and was going to fill up the gas tank before I headed home. I was about 26 weeks along in my pregnancy. I went into the gas station to go use the restroom.  I peeked out of the ladies restroom and exclaimed "Please call 911! I am bleeding and something is wrong with my baby!”

   I don’t really remember what happened after that, or how exactly I got to the hospital. I remember waking up and being on a hospital bed in the ER. The nurse had given me oxygen and was asking me all sorts of questions. "Honey, what is your name? How old are you? How far along are you in your pregnancy? “I took off the oxygen mask long enough to answer all the questions. She then reached over and put the oxygen mask back on my face and left the room.

  I vaguely remember saying, "Please call my husband at work, to tell him what happened."  To one of the nurses and she was able to call him and let him know that our car was at the gas station. I found out later, James called one of his buddies to come get him from work and take him to the car. He broke all sorts of laws and speed records getting to the hospital where I was located on the other side of Houston. James said, "I drove like a bat out of Hell!" I don't doubt it!

   This particular morning it was beautiful outside. However, once I was in the ER, the weather changed drastically and there was a FOG advisory. The doctor said that they were going to Life Flight me to where my OB/GYN was on the other side of Houston by helicopter but because of the weather they couldn't. Since the weather took a turn for the worst, he was talking about delivering the baby at that hospital. He was asking me "What do you want to do?  You need a C-section or you will bleed to death." I was in pain; I had an oxygen mask on my face. I had never had a baby before or knew exactly what was happening to me or my baby. I think I must have said yes to the taking of the baby. The next thing I know they were wheeling me into surgery to have a C-section. I found out later that I had what was called “An abruption of the placenta”.

   This was a very serious condition to have and if they didn’t take the baby, we both could have died. So that day on September 11, 1990, Jessica Ann was born at 2lbs. 7 oz. and 15 inches long at 26 weeks. The doctors got her stabilized and then she was going by ambulance to the other hospital on the other side of Houston. It was the best Neonatal Unit in the country, and happened to be in the city we were living in.

   I stayed at the hospital for a week to recover from my C-section. I had lost a lot of blood and had a hard time recovering.  While I was at the Northwest Hospital, Jessica had been taken to the Southeast Hospital.  James took a week off and went back and forth between hospitals to be with me and then go see Jessica. The nurses brought in a make shift bed for him to use at night so he could stay with me.

   My parents came up from Corpus Christi to see me and to see Jessica. My Dad brought this stuffed Pink Poodle for me. It was so ugly it was cute. James and I found some entertainment value from it by making private jokes about it. My parents only stayed for the day and then went back home.

  Finally after a week, I was sent home with orders to take it easy and not overdo. My sister Lisa came into town and stayed with us and took care of me so that James could go back to work. I still remember the last thing the ER doctor said to me, “You will be able to have other children.” From that statement I understood that he wasn’t expecting Jessica to survive.

   I would go see Jessica every chance I could for the three and a half months she was in the hospital. We still did not live very close to the hospital and with one car it was rough to get to the hospital.  She was so tiny. We put Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, stuffed animals in with her as well as a special rabbit she got from my sister in her incubator. The stuffed animals surrounded her. It was hard to tell where she was with all the animals around. Throughout Jessica’s life Winnie the Pooh would continue to be significant.

   Some people could argue that at 26 weeks she wasn’t a human being when she was in the womb, I beg to differ. When she came out after my C-section she was indeed a little human at 26 weeks.

   Since she came so early, I had a profound sense of loss. I couldn't watch commercials that had babies in them. I was constantly crying. I could not go anywhere, where there were babies at   the time. I had such a sense of sadness.  Some people would probably say I had Post-partum depression at this time. I just knew I was really sad. I was just beginning to feel her inside of me moving around. I hadn’t even had the ultrasound to find out what she was going to be. I felt cheated out of all the joy I was supposed to feel when I was pregnant.

    Jessica had such a struggle to survive during the three and a half months she was in the hospital. She had a hard time gaining weight. Her little lungs were not developing very well. She was on the ventilator for a long time. It was a major triumph when she finally was able to get off the oxygen and breathe on her own.  There were several times during her hospital stay that we would get a call from the nurses in the wee hours saying, "Please come down to see your baby, she is having breathing issues." At this time, I wasn’t able to breastfeed since she had to be on a ventilator.  She was fed interveniously and then eventually the nurses would bottle feed her. Finally on November 4th of 1990 I got to hold my little girl for the first time and feed her a bottle. It was tricky since she was on the oxygen I had to maneuver around all the wires and tubes and be able to sit down in a rocking chair and hold her.

   She finally got to come home on December 22, 1990 and weighed in at 9lbs 5 oz. and was 22 inches long. She was our Christmas present that year. We literally took a picture of her in her carrier under the Christmas tree we had set up. We couldn’t afford any presents for anyone. Jessica was our present that year!

    On this day, we got our baby from the hospital and got her into her car seat. We were so happy to be able to take her home. We were ecstatic. James looked at me and said, "Let's split, we are so out of here." We both laughed. We were so sick of the hospital by this time. We got into the car and practically sped out of the hospital parking lot.   She came home with a heart monitor and oxygen tank to use when she was taking her bottle. A home health nurse came in once a week to check on her and to see how she was progressing.

    Jessica finally grew out of having to have the heart monitor or the oxygen. About a month later she had to have eye surgery. This was a common occurrence among premature babies where there were too many blood vessels in the eyes. So Jessica had eye surgery and was once again in the hospital for a couple of days.

   Being premature Jessica was behind developmentally. She didn’t walk until she was nearly 2 years old. She didn’t get potty-trained until she was 2 ½  When she was 18 months old, I had Kristina. At one point I had two babies less than 2 years old, who couldn’t walk. This made for fun times trying to go wash clothes.  This only lasted for a season, by the time she was 3 years old Jessica was doing great and was walking and talking like any other preschooler.

   When Jessica turned 4, we decided to homeschool our children.  I did some research to find out what the homeschooling laws were for Texas. I mainly did simple things with the girls for about a year or so. Then when Jessica turned 5 she started having problems with letter recognition. I got her tested for Dyslexia since there is a history of it in my family. She was considered borderline on the scale for the learning disability.   Jessica struggled with reading for a while. I just kept working with her.  I think since she had been premature that always played a part of the problem with her reading on such a low level.  By the time she was 9 she was reading on a third grade level.  Even with all her struggles, she was such a joy to be around. She had a profound faith in God at an early age.

   When we moved to Georgia, Jessica, was about 8 at the time, she started having problems with her right elbow. She said, "Mommy, my elbow hurts! I tried to get her to bend it and it would not bend correctly. We took her to the doctor and they did an    x-ray. They saw an extra bone growing there. They even questioned James and me about her elbow being hurt. It was like they thought we had hurt her. We managed to get her into a specialist and he got an MRI of her elbow. We scheduled surgery and she had surgery on her elbow to get rid of the extra bone. At this time she was having problems with her gait. The doctor chalked it up to her having a mild case of cerebral palsy since she was born premature.  He didn’t think anything different. 

   We found out later that the extra bone was a symptom of the type of brain tumor that apparently she already had growing inside of her. She ended up having surgery on her right ankle the May before she died. She had grown an extra bone and it was pushing on a nerve. It was causing problems with walking. Once she had this surgery, she was in a wheelchair full time. She was never able to recover and be able to walk again. The tumor in her brain had started to grow again and she was having  problems with her balance to be able to walk.

   James and I are just so thankful that we had our little girl for the 10 years and 11 months of her life. She died just short of her 11th birthday which would have been on 9-11-2001.

We could have continued with more cancer treatment when they said the tumor had grown some more but Jessica didn’t want to. She could have had another surgery to remove the tumor and could have had a bone marrow transplant.  We asked her what she wanted to do since she was the one that would have to endure all of the treatments. Jessica was in the hospital on and off for the 14 months after her diagnoses for treatment.  

    She said, “Mommy, I just want to go home.” So that is what we did. We took her home and we made her final days as comfortable as we possibly could. By this time we had two other children. So Kristina and Justin would go into Jessica’s room and would watch TV with her or color with her.  I would take her outside on the front porch so she could hang out with Kristina and Justin as well as the neighborhood children.

   A month before she died, she got to go to Happy Days Camp. It is a camp for kids with cancer and their siblings. This one week, she got to enjoy a lifetime of experiences. I am so glad that James and I decided to let her go to the camp that week. Looking back that is a week we missed with her. We thought we had more time with her. The counselor she had was wonderful. She documented the whole week for us. We feel like we were there after reading about what they all did that week. They had a lot of activities, movie night, and the ultimate was the prom they had complete with a Limousine to take them to the prom.  When Jessica passed away, she was still wearing her bracelet from camp. We put the little stuffed rabbit that my sister gave her at birth in the casket with her.

   We decided that we were going to celebrate her birthday early this particular year. We had set the date for August 5, 2001 to have a big party. I still remember the last day she was able to say any words. She called and talked to her brother, Jeremy and my sister, Lisa and then she called my Dad to talk to him. After that day, she lost her ability to speak. I still remember something she said that day, "Mommy, how can I live if I cannot color?" She loved drawing and coloring.  She lost her motor function that day as well. We never got to have the party on earth. Instead Jessica died that day and had I am sure had the biggest birthday celebration in heaven.

   I write about Jessica, not to get sympathy but to remember that I do have a daughter named Jessica Ann and she now resides in heaven. I want people to know that she did live on this earth for a short time. She was too good to be here for very long.  She was definitely an angel on earth.  She wouldn't have been able to handle all the evil that our world is dealing with now.   


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