We’ve heard it time and time again, but it’s a message that always bears repeating: if you’re worried about your pregnancy, ALWAYS seek help.
Ayla Heller wants every mum out there to remember this, following her own terrifying experience with her daughter, Maddy.
Ayla shared her story on Facebook, recalling how she had an emergency labour with Maddy, at 38 weeks.
The day of Maddy’s birth was just like any other day. Ayla got up and headed to work, and noticed early on that Maddy ‘wasn’t kicking around very much’.
Initially, she thought nothing of it, presuming that it was just ‘a less active day’. However, when nothing had changed by the evening, Ayla became a little concerned.
“I took a bath, drank cold orange juice, Dalton [her husband] poked at my belly, and we even listened to her heartbeat with our foetal Doppler – but there was still no movement,” she wrote.
“We became a little panicked, but since I had felt her adjust positions and heard her heartbeat, I knew she was at least alive, so I didn’t know what to do.”
Like so many other mums-to-be, Ayla turned to the internet for advice – but the information and opinions were totally conflicted.
Her mother, meanwhile, was resolute: she advised her to at least call the midwife.
Ayla did as her mother suggested, and was told to head to hospital, where a bed would be waiting for her. Once there, Ayla was hooked up to monitors, to track her baby’s movement, and her midwife made her way to her bedside.
“Upon my midwife’s arrival, she wasted no time to inform me that things were not looking the way they wanted, and I was most likely going to have an emergency Caesarean that night,” she wrote.
“We were informed that if there were life-threatening problems with Maddy – which they believed to be a pretty high chance – she would be life-flighted over to Randall’s [Hospital].”
In the end, Ayla was rushed to the operating room for an emergency delivery, even before her husband had made it.
In the end, everything was – thankfully – fine.
“She came out fine and cried a little bit, but she needed oxygen. After about 40 more minutes, Maddy and I were released back to our original room,” added Ayla.
“There, I was informed that my placenta had aged prematurely, was calcified, and had basically given up.
“This had caused Maddy to not be receiving as much oxygen or food as she needed. This was causing her to try to preserve her energy, which is why she had stopped moving.
“This also caused her to have low blood-sugar upon arrival, so she needed to be hooked up to a glucose drip IV, her first few days.”
It was a closer call than anyone had anticipated. Indeed, Ayla revealed that when her mother asked what would have happened if she hadn’t gone to hospital, the reply was: “She wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t have made it the rest of the night.”
Ayla knows that she and Maddy were really lucky, and this is why she chose to share her story – to urge others worried that something’s up, to go and get help.
“Things like this DO happen. You know your body and what’s normal for your baby,” Ayla wrote.
“And BABIES DON’T RUN OUT OF ROOM!!! That was the common response I kept seeing [online]. Babies will always kick, whether there’s much room or not.
“IF YOU HAVE DOUBTS, GO IN. GO IN. GO IN. GO IN!!! Always be safe rather than sorry. Because I almost didn’t. I almost waited ‘til morning to see if anything changed. And had I done that, I wouldn’t have my love.”
Ayla’s message is a really important one, and we hope that others will bear it in mind when faced with their own dilemma.
