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Kristal Sue
When my husband arrived home and I told him about the phone call from the social worker, his initial reaction was the same as mine. Absolutely no, we already had 6 children. At that time our grown daughter who had tragically become a widow just a few months before was living at home with her 2-year-old son. We definitely had a house full, but something inside was telling me I had to have this baby. My husband understood and we made the call to let the social worker know we would take her. A few days later, on our anniversary, the social worker called to let us know he would be delivering the infant girl the next day. That evening we had a quick dinner out to celebrate our anniversary and then spent the rest of the evening shopping for a layette.
The following day as planned, the social worker delivered the most incredibly beautiful baby girl we had ever seen. She was a mere 5 lbs. with brilliant blue eyes and a face that looked like a tiny porcelain doll. We named her Kristal.
The first night Kristal was cranky but that was to be expected. Blood tests at the hospital showed that she was clean from drugs but the natural mother’s drug history was unknown. The next afternoon I had put Kristal down for a nap and started doing some housework. When she started to cry my oldest daughter asked if she should pick her up. I told her that I needed to start bonding with the baby and would go get her myself. When I walked into the room I realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. Kristal was only 7 days old but she had turned completely around in the crib and had flipped over on her back. It was then that I saw she was not breathing and had started to turn blue. I picked her up and ran from the room screaming to my oldest son to dial 911. I started praying that I would remember how to do the infant CPR that I had been taught. It all came back to me in a flash and I started mouth to mouth resuscitation. In between breaths I remember telling her “Don’t leave us, we will love you!” By the time the fire department and police arrived she was starting to breathe on her own again. Not wanting to wait for the ambulance that would take several more minutes to arrive, we were loaded into a police car with a fireman holding Kristal and rushed to the hospital 5 miles away.
In the emergency room I remember the scene of this tiny fragile infant lying on what seemed to be such a huge white hospital gurney with doctors and nurses desperately trying to keep her breathing stabilized. One of the doctors asked me to go back over everything that had happened, from the moment she stopped crying in the bedroom to when she finally started breathing on her own again. He needed to know how long she was without oxygen so they could determine if there was any brain damage. Although it seemed like an eternity, it was no more than 3 minutes.
Within a few hours the doctors had stabilized her condition enough to transport her by special ambulance attended by a doctor and a nurse to a nearby major medical center that had a neonatal intensive care unit.
Three days later the doctors told us she had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and had apparently had a grand mal seizure. EEG's showed she was still having seizure activity in her brain. They also diagnosed her as having sleep apnea, a condition where a person will quit breathing while they are asleep. We were finally allowed to take her home a week later with a prescription of Phenobarbital for the seizures and an apnea monitor.
The apnea monitor was a small machine that would monitor her breathing while she was asleep. We were instructed that whenever she was going to sleep we would have to attach the apnea monitor electrodes to her tiny little chest with an elastic binding. If she stopped breathing, an obnoxiously loud screeching alarm would be set off and we would have to awaken her and make sure she started breathing again. At first whenever the alarm would go off everyone in the household would wake up, but within a few weeks our older children found they could sleep right through it. Some weeks it would go off a few times, sometimes not at all. In July just before her 2nd birthday, the alarm went off 54 times, and then magically it stopped. We had the machine checked and it was working perfectly. Her sleep apnea had disappeared completely. By her 2nd birthday in October, the seizure activity in her brain had diminished enough that the doctors were able to start weaning her off the Phenobarbital.
From the beginning we could see she was developmentally delayed. Kristal didn’t sit up until she was 10 months old, walk until she was 18 months old or start talking until she was 2 years old. At 3 years old testing confirmed what we already knew, she was definitely developmentally delayed. Kristal’s daddy started taking her to speech therapy several times a week and she attended preschool 3 days a week. The social activities of preschool really seemed to help her development and she was able to start kindergarten when she was 5 years old.
In 3rd grade now, she's been placed in a special day class where is is able to get the special attention she needs. She is behind the other children scholastically, but she is gradually catching up. Kristal is a beautiful, happy little girl whose incredible smile warms our hearts. We have high hopes for her future but only time will tell how much she was really affected by her tragic beginnings.
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