Photo courtesy Steve and Melissa Harrison • Steve Harrison, right, holds his son Noah for the first time as wife Melissa looks on 21 days after Noah was born in August 2013. Complications caused Noah to be taken by cesarean section just 26 weeks into the pregnancy. After 133 days at Covenant HealthCare, the family is looking forward to celebrating their first Mothers Day together on Sunday.
By Bill Petzold
Editor
BRIDGEPORT — The saying goes that good things come in small packages.
It’s no wonder then that little Noah Lee Harrison is one of the greatest things to ever happen to his mom and dad.
Noah, son of Melissa (Mueller) and Steve Harrison — both formerly of Richville and now living in the Bridgeport area — evidently couldn’t wait to be born.
Last summer, Melissa and Steve were getting the nursery ready, preparing to welcome their first child into the world sometime around his due date of December 1, 2013.
But nature had other plans, and at 8:37 a.m. on Thursday, August 29, Noah was born via cesarian section — just 26 weeks and four days into his gestation. Full-term children are born at 37 weeks, and the average pregnancy lasts 40 weeks — meaning Noah was at least two and a half months early.
Doctors and nurses had told Melissa that if Noah could wait until August 24 to be born he would be “in the clear,” and Noah managed to wait until the following Thursday morning. Still he was tiny, weighing just one pound, eight ounces. He was just 12 inches long.
“My blood pressure was high, and it ruined the placenta,” Melissa said, explaining that she experienced preeclampsia during her pregnancy. “He wasn’t getting oxygen or blood in the womb, and that’s why they had to take him.
“I didn’t even know it was going on. It just happened that I had a doctor’s appointment that week, and I went to the doctor and my blood pressure was high and they said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to go to the hospital.’ So I went over to the hospital and they admitted me and I stayed — I never went home.”
Melissa spent a full week in Covenant HealthCare before Noah’s birth.
“ I was on bedrest,” Melissa said. “They would not let me out of bed for that week. They were hoping it would be longer (until Noah was born), but it wasn’t.”
The morning of August 29, while being prepped for surgery Melissa made a frantic call to her sister Lynette Mueller, who relayed the word to Steve at work that Noah was on the way. Steve made it to the hospital five minutes before Noah was born and was with Melissa during the delivery.
“I was totally awake (for the C-section), they gave me an epidural,” Melissa said. “He was born and he was not breathing. He was blue. Steve and I were just sitting there waiting. The funny thing is, they thought he was a girl. They looked at him the wrong way, and they said, ‘You have a girl.’ They brought him up and I didn’t even get to see his face, and they said, ‘Say Happy Birthday to whatever you’re going to call your girl.’ I said her name’s going to be Emma, and they said, ‘Well say Happy Birthday to Emma,’ and 45 minutes later they finally came in and told us he was a boy. They were so worried because he wasn’t breathing and he was blue that they just looked at his butt (to determine his sex). Later on when they got him upstairs and they got him stable, the nurse must have said, ‘I told them it was a girl and it’s not,’ so she came back and told us that.’”
Escaping a damaged placenta was just the first obstacle for Noah. Twelve hours after he was born, his parents went upstairs to finally be able to see their son. They looked down into an incubator to see their little boy sleeping with tubes everywhere, hooked to a feeding machine and a ventilator.
Noah took up residence in Covenant HealthCare’s Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, (RNICU or more commonly NICU) where he would stay for the next several months. The NICU is staffed with a team of specialists and designed to care for babies who are born prematurely like Noah, or for babies who require special care before they can be allowed to go home with their families.
Because of Noah’s delicate condition, Steve and Melissa had to wait a full three weeks before they could hold their baby. In the meantime, Noah underwent heart surgery to close his ductus arteriosus — a blood vessel that connects to the right ventricle of a fetus’ heart to bypass fluid-filled lungs in the womb. During a normal gestation period, the ductus arteriosus will close on its own as the developing baby prepares for birth, but Noah was born before the problem was resolved naturally.
Doctors told Steve and Melissa that the surgery would make Noah extremely sick. Melissa said that it took a bit for him to get sick, but when he did, it was perhaps the scariest time of Noah’s hospital stay.
“He got sick bad, and for a couple days it was really iffy if he was going to live,” Melissa said. “When he was born, they said, ‘You have 48 hours to see if he will pull through this and do what he’s supposed to do,’ and he did. But after the heart surgery it was bad. We got him baptized and everything because we were so worried. The doctor said it will get worse before it got better, and it did — it got really worse before it got better.”
But once Noah came through the surgery, Melissa said that Noah’s progress began to improve.
“After that, everything cruised along, they were right about that,” Melissa said. “He had to have a feeding tube put in, but that was later on and he was more healthy, but he was always up and down. We’d go up there one day and he’d be doing good, and the next day he’d be doing bad. … It was a rollercoaster big-time. He would eat and then he wouldn’t eat and would have to go back on an IV to eat, and that was a huge thing. His stomach would get big because he couldn’t handle it and his intestines were too immature to handle food.”
Noah spent most of his time in the hospital being fed through total parenteral nutrition (TPN), a method of feeding that involves injecting fluids into a vein, thereby bypassing Noah’s gastrointestinal tract, which was not yet capable of processing food taken by mouth. The process gives the baby the nutrients its body needs, but the key for getting Noah home was for him to start eating on his own.
“Sometimes the IV lines were blown and they’d have to put them in his head,” Melissa said. “That was horrible, watching them. One time it took them nine tries to get an IV in the head.”
Melissa was in the hospital for a week before Noah’s birth and about four days after. At first she wasn’t able to drive as she recovered from surgery, and so began months of trips to the hospital morning and night to check Noah’s progress — and worrying about him when they were at home.
“I’d have to wait for Steve to get out of work, and then we’d go and see him … every day for four and half months,” Melissa said.
Noah was finally healthy enough to come home January 8. On January 6, a winter storm blanketed most of the area with more than a foot of snow. In the meantime, Steve and Melissa were wrapping their baby in much warmer blankets, preparing to bring him home after 133 days at Covenant HealthCare.
“He was released on the coldest day of the year,” Melissa said, laughing. “It was -30 degrees that day, I believe. They make you stay up in the NICU a couple days before (you go home) to see if you can take care of your child, so there was a humongous storm that night and a couple days later he was released.
“He had to suck, swallow and breathe all at the same time. After that (feeding) tube went in, life changed big-time for him. I was so worried about doing the surgery because he had to go back on the ventilator again, and I did not want him on a vent again. Every time you go back on a vent, you become more reliant on it. … When he came out of surgery though, they took the tube out and he did absolutely fine after that. He was on a home oxygen system, and I was like, ‘Holy cow, this has changed his life.’ I don’t know what that surgery did to him, but that changed his life so he could come home. I don’t know what made that turnaround so fast; it was weird. The doctors were even shocked. Two days later he was on home oxygen, and the doctors were like, ‘He can go home any time now.’ … They just had to wait for him to heal up a little bit.”
Since he came home, Noah’s improvement has been steady. He still has a feeding port in his belly, which will stay in place until he can eat a prescribed amount of formula through a bottle. Steve and Melissa have to feed him with a feeding machine sometimes. He goes to the doctor once a month for a check-up, and he was going every other week for eye exams because being a ventilator can damage an infant’s retinas, but his last exam went so well he is not due back for another year.
But as of May 1, Noah weighed 14 pounds, 10 ounces and is a happy boy who smiles a lot. He is 24 inches long now, with his mom’s eyes and his daddy’s long legs.
“Life is precious, that’s what I’ve learned, because we went through a lot with him,” Melissa said. “And I learned that, you know what, you have to go day-by-day with these kids. I’m a nurse, but I didn’t know that aspect — I didn’t know anything about NICU life. NICU life is so different than anything you’ve ever seen in your life.
Steve and Melissa both expressed their gratitude to the NICU staff of Covenant HealthCare for their skill, their support and the outstanding treatment that Noah received during his stay. According to Covenant’s website (covenanthealthcare.com), the 55-bed RNICU, which opened in 1974, has served more than 10,000 ill newborns. Melissa said that the NICU staff holds reunions for the babies they have helped.
“They were wonderful, absolutely wonderful people,” she said. “I learned so much about him, and they kept me very updated. We were so updated it wasn’t even funny. When I was in nursing school they said, ‘Don’t ever tell them you’re a nurse when you go into a hospital, they’ll treat you different.’ Well I finally had to because they would say, ‘Well how do you know that?’ … I finally just said, ‘I’m a nurse, I know what you guys are talking about. I don’t know what this machine is, please explain it to me. I don’t know this ‘baby world,’ but you can talk to me in medical terms and I’ll know what you mean and if I don’t know I’ll ask. And they were awesome about it.”