Joshua's Story

I was so excited to find out that I was pregnant .  This would be my first child.  I didn't know what to expect but everyone told me stories on how their pregnancies went.  My pregnancy went very well.  I got sick some but not real bad.  The main problem that I had was gaining to much weight..whoo.  I gained  42 pounds  with Josh and I hated that part of it. My due date was September 15 and about 3 weeks before my due date I started having contractions.  It was on a Tuesday night.  I went to the hospital and they checked me and told me that I wasn't in labor but I probably had a bladder infection and gave me some medicine and sent me home.  So all that night I had contractions about 5 to 7 minutes apart. By the next morning I was wore out.  I didn't get much sleep and I wasn't able to eat much.  By Wednesday evening I had all I could stand so I went back to the hospital and they sent me home again and the doctor said I was trying to rush my delivery and that I wasn't in real labor.  I went home and  I hurt all the next day and all Thursday night and my contractions was every 5 minutes  on the dot if not closer.  I hadn't been able to sleep in 3 days and I was exhausted.  Friday morning my husband took me to my Mom's so she could help watch the contractions and she made him take me to the doctor's office so they could give me something to help me sleep if I wasn't in labor.  When the doctor checked me I was 5 1/2 centimeters dialated and my water was ready to break, so he sent me to the hospital to have me checked in and he said we would have a baby by dark.  So I was checked in about 10:30 am that Friday morning and I was already so tired that I didn't have the strength to hardly talk to anyone much,  but I was so excited because I knew it wouldn't be long that the baby would be here. We didn't know what we were having so that made it more exciting.  My husband already had 2 daughters from previous marriages so he was really wanting a son.  I was in labor all that day and I wasn't progressing with the dialating to good.  Around 8:00 pm that night Josh started showing fetal distress and they said that he showed positive signs after each distress he had.  So we trusted them and thought everything was going ok.  So around 8:00 pm they checked me and said that I was close enough to being fully dialated so they told me to start pushing.  Earlier they had gave me some pain medicine in my IV to help with the pain so I was pretty groggy from that too.  So when I started pushing I wasn't getting much done so they gave me a drug that enduces labor harder to help me have harder contractions.  After about a hour of pushing they decided to use vacum extract to help me deliver him and they placed the vacum cup on his head and turned it on and through the whole time it popped off his head about 5 different times and the doctor would put it back on and kept trying to pull him out.  This went on for another hour of using the vacum extract and finally the doctor's partner came in to help with the delivery and one got up on my stomach and pushed while the other one used the vacum extract.   Finally about 10:20 pm that night I pushed him out after 2 hours and 20 minutes of hard pushing and he had a heart beat but he was not breathing.  So they started doing CPR on him and placed a adult size oxygen mask on him to help give him some oxygen until the doctor arrived.  They hadn't called my pedatrician so they called one of their doctors who was at home and had to drive to the hospital and when she got there about 25 to 30 minutes after he was born and she got him incubated with a tube down in his lungs to get him some oxygen.  They took him out of the room and when they went to another room he started having siezures one after another.  They finally got him calm with phenobarbital and valiums and they had him flown to a bigger hospital to the ICU unit.  When they arrived with him the doctor in the unit was furious on how he looked and wanted to know what hospitial delivered him.  He made a remark that "He was bruised from head to toe".  After they evaluted him they said he had 3 skull fractures and his liver was bruised.  Which we think it was bruised from when during my delivery another doctor came in to help the other doctor deliver Josh.  One of the doctors got up on my stomach with his arm and pushed downward on my stomach.   So the next morning I was released so I could go to the hospital where my son was.  When we got there they said he probably wouldn't live more than 72 hours. But by the 2nd day he opened his eyes  and everyone was amazed.  He wasn't able to swallow or eat through his mouth and his vision and hearing wasn't as good as they should of been.  He had a lot of handicaps from the damage to his brain stem and his brain.  His head was bruised all around the top of his head and when you felt his skull it moved like a water bed from where they used the vacum on him it sucked a lot of blood up to his skull.  He stayed in the icu unit for 10 weeks and they done alot of different test on him and they told us that from all the injuries he had that  he would die one day but they didn't know when because his brain stem would not mature has he grows and his body would eventually shut down.  They said that it could be in a year or 7 years down the road but there was no way of telling when for sure.  His neuroligist always called him a miracle baby.  He said that he should of never survived his birth and the Lord must of wanted him on this earth for everyone to love.  He was with us for 17 months and we had to put him on morphine a few days before he died.  He died at 3:11 am on Febuary 12 on Sunday morning 2 days before Valentine's Day in my arms at home with all of our family there.  I watched my little Sugar Popper take his last breath and then he went to see the LORD.  We buried him on Valentine's Day.   My brothers and sister and their spouses bought me a chest instead of buying  each other anything for Valentines Day.  I still have the chest and it has all of Joshua's memories in it .  That chest is special to my heart and I will treasure it always.  If they would of only had given me a C-Section he wouldn't of sustained so much brain damage.  But when I asked the doctor during my delivery if I could have a C-Section and he told me women didn't have C-Section's to get out of having a baby.  So by his choice he damaged my son and my son suffered everyday of his life with pain, IV's, and needles.

Joshua Carson Williams August 27, 1993 - February 12, 1995