Miracle Babies

I was so ready to write this blog. I even had a title picked out..."Beware: Venting in Process."
But, I can't anymore.
I'm sure that a lot of you are familiar with the show Grey's Anatomy. Well, I am by no means an avid watcher, but tonight I am so glad that I took a nap and now I can't sleep. I was flipping through the channels when I came across Grey's Anatomy and I intended to use it as background noise while checking my blog and facebook.
But it became so much more than that.

I haven't seen much of this episode because I turned it on late, but I do know the jist of one of the stories...

There is a baby girl who was born pre-mature. Something is wrong with her Mom and they had to move her into surgery so she never got a chance to see her little girl. For a while it seemed like the little girl was not going to make it and her Mom's only concern was that her baby was going to die without being held. Well, she was right. Her baby was going to die without ever being held because this little girl was in such critical condition that it wasn't wise to pick her up. Now, I don't know what any of the numbers mean on the little monitors that they always give us a view of in those shows, but I do know you start to see the numbers drop, it's not a good sign. A male doctor, Dr. Karev, decided that this little girl was going to die either way, so he honored this little girl's mom by holding her while she quickly declined. However, rather than dieing in this in the arms of Dr. Karev, her heart rate started to pick up and she was surviving. I guess it was because of this thing they call, The Kangaroo Hold.
I looked this up on the internet and found another interesting case that was shown on the TODAY show.
Mom's Hug Revives Baby That Was Pronounced Dead
Kangaroo care’ David and Kate were practicing what Australians call “kangaroo care.” Actually, it is widely practiced throughout the world, especially in poorer countries where incubators may not be available for premature babies. An infant is held skin-to-skin to their mother or father, generating heat for the newborn much like a baby kangaroo receives in its mother’s pouch.

Kate had heard of kangaroo care before. “[The baby] comes out of you, and all of a sudden there isn’t the warmth or smell of the mother or the sound of their heartbeat. And so putting him back on my chest was as close to him being inside me where he was safe.”
TODAY Moms: The power of ‘kangaroo care’
Jamie continued to come around as he lay across Kate’s chest. He began grabbing at his mother’s finger, as well as his father’s. And when Kate put a dab of breast milk on her finger, Jamie eagerly accepted it.
Kate finally began to believe her baby was actually alive. “We thought, ‘He’s getting stronger — he’s not dead,’ ” she said. But the family wasn’t getting any encouragement from their doctor. While the Oggs urged hospital personnel to summon him, they were repeatedly told what they were seeing was still just reflex from a baby already declared dead.
Kate Ogg told Curry they had to “fib” to get the doctor to return to her bedside. “We kept saying, ‘He’s doing things dead babies don’t do, you might want to come and see this,’ ” she told Curry.
But the skeptical doctor still didn't return. “So David said, ‘Go and tell him we’ve come to terms with the baby’s death, can he just come and explain it.’ That made him come back.”

Kate Ogg told the London Daily Mail the doctor was in disbelief when he arrived back at the bedside. “He got a stethoscope, listened to Jamie’s chest and just kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’
Dr. Lisa Eiland of the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City told NBC News there may actually be a good grounding in science for what seemed like a miracle. “What’s important is the warmth that the mother provides and the stimulation that the baby may have received from hearing the mother’s heartbeat,” Eiland said. “So those are all things that may have helped the baby in terms of going down the path to living as opposed to the path of death.”
For his part, David Ogg gives all the credit to his “very strong, very smart wife” for the family’s now being able to enjoy raising Jamie right along with his sister Emily.
“She instinctively did what she did,” Ogg told The Daily Mail. “If she hadn’t have done that, then Jamie probably wouldn’t be here.”

I have never been so grateful that I haven't been able to sleep. These two stories just spoke to my heart, in a big way! I think that even though Kangaroo Care is used on babies, it is still so relevant as we grow older. It is so true that sometimes all we need to revive ourselves is to know that somebody is there and somebody loves us. After hitting rock bottom and dying a little inside, once we know that someone is there for us and that unconditional love is present in our lives, we can be brought back to life. I am so thankful for the people that have shown me the love I need to survive, to thrive, to live.