William's Story

William is our little miracle Preemie. He was born at just over 24 weeks gestational age, after being without amniotic fluid for six weeks. He has been a fighter throughout Melissa's entire pregnancy, surprising with a heartbeat each of the five or six times Melissa had to go to the ER for serious complications.

At 18 weeks, a week after Melissa's heaviest and longest period of severe blood loss, we discovered that William's amniotic fluid had all leaked out. The sac had ruptured beyond repair. We were told the pregnancy was no longer viable and that we needed to terminate to protect Melissa's health from further serious complications.

However, since William had already overcome so many odds, we felt like we wanted to give him every last chance, and we also wanted to leave up to God what to do. We decided not to decide.
Each week, we would get new information about William's health. Information that made it very difficult to continue on the course of hoping for that chance, leaving nature to take its course, not deciding when the end would be the end.

With each week that Melissa did not go into labor, we got a little more hopeful. Maybe we could hold out long enough until William was big enough where the doctors could do their best to keep him alive. We entertained this idea, but everyone told us that most likely, William would be too small to survive labor, William would be too small to be able to fit a breathing tube into his lungs, that his lungs would be too underdeveloped due to the lack of amniotic fluid to sustain oxygen. We were fully prepared to face a stillbirth. We had discussed everything from every possible complication  to delivery scenario, up to funeral arrangements.

Melissa had several false alarms. Times when she had contractions, some bleeding, and she was slightly dilated, but she didn't go into labor.

On the day William was born, we expected the same. Melissa had contractions all day, some bleeding. Eventually the contractions changed somewhat so we went in to the hospital in the evening. Once there, same old. The contractions slowed down, lost intensity.

However! Things suddenly took a turn after Melissa went to the bathroom and the contractions were very strong and long. Jeff woke up to Melissa being vocal about the pain. He came over to her bed to calm her down, but she yelled at him to call the nurse!

In comes the nurse, who comments that "this is different..." and in comes the resident doctor.
Cervix is dilated to 4cm. Which is substantial for a 24 week old baby. They could see the head protruding. Melissa started panicking, combined with more contracting. Baby was supposed to stay in there longer! It was going to be too small!

And a moment later, baby came right out.

It's a boy, they said. He's alive, they said.

The neonatology team was there and they did what they could while Melissa immediately faced the afterbirth. They fit the breathing tube into him and he was accepting oxygen, they said. So we told them to do everything they could to try and stabilize our little son.

Did we have a name for him, they asked.

Jeff and I looked at one another and the only name out of the dozen boy names we could remember was William Elliot Padgett.