Nina's Story

- By Sylvia

.I am Silvia, the mother of Nina.
Nina is 8 months now and I’m still overwhelmed by her presence in our lives! I cannot remember well how life was without her. Nina is our first daughter. My husband and I kept our relationship between 2 countries for quite some time. I’m Brazilian and he is German. Since we were both freelancers, it was not difficult to organize our schedules to spend time together in 2 different continents. I came to Germany for the New Year’s
Eve in 2007 and we came back together to spend the summer in Brazil. I stopped taking my pills after I made a mess with the jetlag, and told Thomas (who always wanted a child) I would start again next month; if I got pregnant, it would be ok, but I did not believe it would happen. 5 weeks later I had my first ultrasound! It was one of the biggest moments of my life, everybody knows how strong it is to hear your baby’s heartbeat, but when it happens it’s impossible to describe how great it is. We decided to get married and have the baby in Brazil, but we figured it would be better to move to Germany so I could take care of the baby and my husband could keep working. My pregnancy was wonderful. No problems, just fun. I was alone most of the time while Thomas worked in Switzerland and China.
He arrived a few weeks before she was born and we got married when all the papers were done.

I was already 39 weeks and no sign that Nina wanted to come to us! The exams were all ok. When I completed 40 weeks we repeated Doppler and something was wrong. When the doctor at the lab asked “Who is your doctor?” my heart almost stopped beating. He explained to us that my baby sent an “alert sign”, she was sending more blood than usual to her head and it meant she was saving oxygen. He thought we should not wait anymore. That night was awful… I was terribly scared. Next day in the morning my doctor, Thomas and I agreed that I should go for a caesarean.
At 9 PM Nina was born. She cried a lot and stopped as soon as they put her in my arms. Everything fine, big
emotion… The apgar was great, and a few minutes later my doctor explained that they found out I have an uterus septic and Nina had her head turned to the back, probably because there was not enough space in the last weeks and that was the best position she could find. But everything was ok.

Her first day was good, she was beautiful and very different from the other babies! Full of blond hair, huge Chinese blue eyes. She slept all the time and I felt the happiest woman in the world. My husband was in heaven.
Our problems started in the second day. She wasn’t able to drink and a sequence of misunderstandings, things said in the wrong way, transformed what should be perfect into a nightmare. During the night Thomas went to the nursery to take a look at Nina and she wasn’t there. Someone told him she was at the second floor with another doctor so he went downstairs to look for her. The doctor told him she wasn’t able to drink because there was something wrong with her chin, it was too small. I don’t know which words he used to a foreigner, but my husband was really scared
when he came back. I tried to contact this doctor to understand what was going on, but he didn’t come. They sent a nurse instead, who accidentally said “we don’t know if there’s any relation with the big eyes and the chin”. I asked “ what do you mean??” and she gave me some confuse answer, and I noticed she said more than she should. We couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. Nina had to spend many hours receiving light and still couldn’t drink anything. I completely lost it, Nobody could tell us exactly what was going on. In the morning I started to cry really loud in the corridor when the chief of the nurses came to talk to me. She quickly figured that what happened during the night was not right. We are talking about a very famous hospital in São Paulo. In a few minutes the head of the paediatricians
came to talk to us. He told us Nina had a “cyanosis” during the night, that they didn’t know exactly what happened, but she went “pale”. He understood that there was a miscommunication before and it shouldn’t have happened.
He asked if we would agree to move Nina to the semi intensive care just to be sure everything was ok and
run some tests. It would be better for her to keep the treatment for ictericia and if we wanted to, they would call a geneticist. He didn’t believe there was anything wrong with her but it would be better for us to come back home without any doubts. And everything went pretty well, the ECG was ok and the only thing the geneticist found different was some extra skin in her neck.