(2/4) “There was an eighty percent chance of miscarriage. I...

(2/4) “There was an eighty percent chance of miscarriage.  I walked around every day not knowing if my daughter was still alive.  Every two weeks I went to the doctor to check for a heartbeat.  I always asked them to face the ultrasound screen away from me. I couldn’t bear to look.  At week twenty-two my placenta began to fail.  I was hospitalized at week thirty.  The blood flow through the umbilical cord had been reversed.  The delivery took three days.  Her heartbeat was dropping.  The chance of stillbirth was so high.  During the emergency C-section, there were thirty people in the room.  My husband said that all of them had an ‘oh fuck’ look on their face.  The last thing I remember is the gas mask being put over my mouth.  Then I woke up asking for milkshakes.  They wheeled my entire bed into the NICU to meet my daughter.  She’d had oxygen deprivation.  Her heart was halfway beating.  I was still paralyzed so I couldn’t even sit up to look at her.  The nurse took my phone, held it over my daughter, and turned it on ‘selfie mode.’  This is what she looked like when I saw her for the first time.”
(Special Olympics World Games, Abu Dhabi, UAE)