My daughter Hannah was not a planned pregnancy at all, but later on she became the best thing that has ever happen to my husband and me. I was going to school in Southern University in Illinois, one day in the middle of October I had extreme pain in my abdominal area. I went to the ER where I found out that I was pregnant. They first thought that she was eptopic, but three weeks later she was in the right place. Though I did still have uncomfortable cramping through those next few weeks, the doctor said it was normal.
From then on I was sick all day through out most of my pregnancy. We had many sonograms from the first month up until eighth month. When we found out she was a girl, I was smiling from ear to ear. She looked healthy. Moving all the time and we even got to see her yawn. I never had been too excited in my life.
When I was eight months pregnant I was finishing my finals for school. I was so glad I got to finish school before Hannah was born. I was walking down stairs and a girl ran into me and I fell right on my stomach. I was so scared that I did something horrible to my baby. It did put me into labor but the doctors stopped it. That next month my beautiful baby girl, Hannah, was born on June 11, 2003.
I was in labor for 14 hours and pushed for 2 and 1/2 hours because of her big head. I was so tired that after she was born everything was a blur. I had a high fever so they had to take her to ICU for newborns. They just wrapped her up let me kiss her and took her away. Everybody else that was in the room with me got to see her before they took her out of the room.
My mother was the first one to see that Hannah was born without her thumb and all the tops of her fingers on her left hand and on her right, top of her index finger. Also on her right foot half of her big toe was gone and the two toes next to the big one had marks of the bands. About a minute after she saw Hannah, my husband was the next. All he could get out at that moment was “what is wrong with her hands!” My mom told him to be quiet for me because I went through a very difficult labor.
The nurses started cleaning me up and most of the people started coming back into the room with me to hear what the doctor had to say about Hannah. Now at this point everybody knew about Hannah’s hands, but me. So when the doctor told me, I was in complete shock. I didn’t know if I was in a dream or not. I cried of course because all I could think about at that time was when she grew up and she would be made fun of.
When I got to see her finally at around 3:30 in the morning, she was the most perfect and beautiful baby I had ever seen. When I looked at her hands, they weren’t as bad as I thought. From then on we had three ladies that visited Hannah every three months to see how she was developing and got us connected with Shrinners. Hannah will go through her first surgery beginning of September 04 to fix her webbing and clean up the fingers and toes that were affected by ABS. As for her thumb we had a couple of options and they do not want to do anything until she is older because she is so small right now. I could not ask for anything else in the world. She is perfect in everyway and now she is very special.
