Ella’s birth story

I’m excited to share Ella’s story with you. I’ll forget moments, feel free to fill in anything you remember in the comments! I’m an open book, ask me anything, nothing is off limits or offends or is wrong! Feel free to share, tag or link to stories for those who would love to follow along or would be blessed by any part of our story! I share partly for you to get to be a part, and partly for me, that I never forget.

BIRTH STORY

May 9, 2006: admitted to be induced into labor because I was almost at 40 weeks, looking back, it was God’s protection that every happened EXACTLY like it did in perfect timing and with a doctor I wholeheartedly trusted.

May 10, 2006: Elizabeth “Ella” Hope Mitchell was born around 3pm. Delivery was a little stressful, but everything seemed to work itself out and mother and baby were both doing fine.
Around midnight after all the friends and family left we were trying to breastfeed again and it wasn’t going well. Figured it was exhaustion on both sides so we sent Ella to the newborn nursery to be cared for while we got a couple of hours of sleep.

Sometime around 5am we were told that “your baby had some irregular breathing and started seizing so she’s been taken to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit”. Confused, heartbroken and totally stunned we started our round of doctors and nurses coming to tell us the minute by minute discoveries. Joe’s first reaction was to stop and pray, which is good because that was NOT my first reaction.

Here are some excerpts from the blog posts my sister wrote to keep everyone caught up on the story, I’ll link the blog in my profile if you want to read the play-by-play "Ella has become pale and has a yellow tint to her skin, seizures, she is rolling her eyes and moving to one side only, she is clinching her fists and has "modeling" which is when you can see all of the veins in her chest. She is in her own room in NICU and has a team of 7 doctors and specialist and 2 nurses. They have her arms splinted to keep her from pulling out her cords when she has the seizures. There is someone from Children's Hospital coming to look at her and run her spinal tap at lunch time. She has an IV which is feeding her sugar water and is on oxygen to clean all of the acids out of her blood. The two categories they are looking at are Infection which they are already treating her for with antibiotics, or Inborn metabolic Error which means Andrea and Joes genes did not match for Ella.” That week looked like 72 hours of seizures, then something they call myoclonic ticks. A diagnosis of meningitis caused by Group Beta Strep (which I tested negative for in prenatal screenings) and at least a couple of phone calls to come see her and say “goodbye” because they thought they were losing her.

I will say, our greatest gifts in those first few days were a family that stepped in to fill in any gaps and a Sunday School class that fed us, the nurses, packed out a waiting room to capacity, read scripture over us and prayed us through each moment. It’s still the sweetest and hardest days of my life. We stayed in the NICU for exactly 4 week before we were released with a baby girl and no real next steps.