Emily and Nixon's Story

Speaker 1: I have learned that I think I'm a lot stronger than I thought I was. It wasn't hard for us to get pregnant. We got pregnant a few months and everything was very normal in the beginning.

Speaker 2: Emily came into our office on the day that I was staffing it for an ultrasound. She had two previous ultrasounds by our practice: one in the first trimester, one of the second trimester. Little Nixon was totally normal. Everything was fine. In the third trimester, she came in for an ultrasound for growth and that's when we discovered that there was a problem.

Speaker 1: They told us the prognosis is pretty grim, about 60% chance that he would come out from being like mildly mentally handicapped to severely mentally handicapped in maybe even just like a slight form of autism.

Speaker 2: Hemorrhage in a fetus is rare. We see it fairly often in newborns and premature babies but in utero it's not something we see very often. In many cases, the prognosis is not good at all.

Speaker 1: That's not exactly what you anticipated for your life, for your child, so it was really hard to hear that.

Speaker 3: We felt like there was a real void when something is going wrong in a pregnancy. There's just a lot that needs to be done. There's a lot of planning, sometimes there's a lot of decisions, there's a lot of choices.

Speaker 4: Our collaboration with Miami Valley Hospital involves the neonatal intensive care individuals as well as fetal medicine group so we're all inclusive taking care of the child prenatally and postnatally.

Speaker 1: When we had that consult and she came and she was able to see the report of the MRI and then know exactly what was entail for my husband and I for the rest of our pregnancy, what was going to be going on. She made the process pretty much seamless working between Maternal-Fetal Medicine and then Dayton Children's.

Speaker 4: We sat down and went over everything we knew and all the data we had collected, making the best diagnosis that I could prenatally and there were some variables still involved.

Speaker 3: Emily made the choice to give birth at Miami Valley Hospital so that if he needed NICU care, it would be readily available. She did birth here and Nixon behaved perfectly.

Speaker 1: He had [the shot placed 00:03:23] and then we stayed at Children's for a night. Then the next morning, we got to go home. It was the exact opposite of what I had anticipated because we got to go home from the hospital at Miami Valley. We got to go home, be home for the weekend, and then went to Children's and had the surgery. He didn't have to be taken away from me.

Speaker 3: I think Nixon and the [Seagraves 00:03:42] demonstrate well how collaboration between large institutions benefits our population locally. We want keep people local. We want to offer them the best totally inclusive care that they can get.

Speaker 2: The unique thing about this case is that little Nixon has done so well. This was a horrible prognosis. You try to be as optimistic as possible. This is one of these things that I refer to as a miracle and that he's defied what the normal expectations are. That's the wonderful thing about this.

Speaker 1: He ended up definitely being my miracle. He made me a mom.