Okay, after months of having this site up, I am finally going to finish the link to my story.
I found out I was pregnant in June, 1996, a complete SURPRISE! I hadn't planned on having any kids so soon, and I had wanted to finish college and be somewhat prepared. However, I found out life doesn't wait until your ready to give you things.
My pregnancy was pretty uneventful for the first 5 months. It wasn't until I went for my routine
sonogram at 20 weeks that I found out something was wrong. The ultrasound tech said that it looked like something was wrong with the baby's bowels and she needed to have the doctor come in and check it out. The doctor came in and scanned my belly, discussed it with the tech, and came to his conclusion...my my baby, a girl, had a tumor known as a sacrococcygeal teratoma located at the base of her spine. We spoke to the genetic counselor that day, Geoff, my dad, and my sister in law Tiffany thankfully had came with me for the sonogram! She showed us some drawings of exactly what my baby had, gave us some statistics of 60/40% chance of surviving the pregnancy. The goal was to make it to 37 weeks, and then they would do a
c-section, and my daughter would be sent to Children's Hospital to have the tumor removed. She also told us that we could have a selective abortion....this was out of the question. I was going to give my daughter every chance at life that she deserved.
From then on I was labeled as having a "high risk" pregnancy and I had to have a sonogram every two weeks when I went to the doctors. That lasted for about a month, and things seemed to be going pretty well, the tumor wasn't growing much, but I had started having a lot of back pain. I thought that it was just from standing around all day at work, but my mom thought that I might be having pre-tern labor so we went to the hospital. Well, it turned out that I was in labor, so I was put on Brethine and bedrest at home. My next doctors appointment was in two days, and it was then the he decided the best place for me to be was in the hospital on bedrest, that way I could be monitored everyday with non-stress tests and sonograms. The goal was to prolong the pregnancy as much as possible, but in case of an earlier than expected delivery, I was put on steroids to make the babies lungs stronger.
After being in the hospital exactly one month, my doctor decided it was time to deliver. He thought that it was too risky to keep her inside me any longer because she was going into congestive heart failure and he was afraid she was developing hydrops.
Since the hospital I had spent my last month at wasn't capable of handling a case as serious as my, I was transferred to another hospital in town that is what they call a "level 3". The doctors felt that a c~section would be they safest way to bring my baby into the world. So on December 20 at 4:24 p.m. Abigail Madison Taylor Cordrey was brought into this world Even though she was 2 months premature, she weighed over nine pounds, of which about six were due to the tumor. Part 2
