At the end of Dec. 1989 I found out I was pregnant with my first child. It was a surprise, but not unwelcome. I was very ill for the first few months so I quit my job, to stay at home and rest. Because we had not planned this pregnancy, we were financially not ready and subsequently my husband joined the Army. During the few months before he left for basic training, I was seen at a clinic in a town nearby. The first due date I was given was Sept. 18th 1990. After my husband joined the Army I was seen at a nearby base hospital. That's when all the trouble began. The doctors there and I saw many of them, decided that due to measurements of my abdomen my due date should be changed to Sept. 25th. After a few months they then decided to move my due date to Oct. 1st. In my 7th month I was in a car accident and was thrust into the steering wheel on my stomach. I was hospitalized for the night and had two contractions during that time. Through out my pregnancy never once did I have a Sonogram or an NST (non-stress test).

Around the last week of September, I started having false labor and strange pains. I went into the hospital numerous times and was sent home with out being checked by a doctor. On my weekly visits I would tell the doctor (who ever I happened to see that week) about it and they told me to do a kick count without fully explaining how to do it. I was under the impression that if the baby kicked ten times a day we were fine, but its supposed to be ten times in a 1/2hr period of time. Then on Oct. 9th I finally went into labor. My pains started around noon and I stayed at home until the contractions were five minutes apart. I arrived at the hospital around 9:30pm that evening and was told I was only dilated to 1cm. They were going to send me home to walk until I was further dilated. One of the nurses decided to put me on a monitor to time the contractions first. After a few minutes there were a few nurses talking in hushed voices, outside of the room I was in, and one nurse came in and told me they were concerned with the baby's heart rate and were going to call a doctor in to check it out. A few minutes later the doctor arrived and looked at the strip coming out of the monitor and explained to me that there was a little trouble and that they were going to break my water in order to speed up labor. When the doctor broke my water, I remember the faces of everyone in the room, they looked like something was seriously wrong. That's when I was told that there was meconium staining in the water (later I was to find out that there was little to no water it was only a thick meconium mixture). For those who don't know what meconium is, it’s the baby's very first bowel movement (the tarry looking stuff). Also at that time the baby's heart rate dropped real low and it was decided that I would have an emergency C-section. After 7 unsuccessful tries to give me a spinal I was put under a general anesthetic. Steven was born at 10:38pm. His agar scores were 0 at 1 and 1 at 5. That means, on scale of 1-10 in life signs at 1 min old he rated a 0. That's because there was no heartbeat and no breathing. At 5 minutes old he rated a 1. He was an hour old before taking his first spontaneous breath. He was not doing well at all.

I slept a druged sleep most of the night and when I awoke in the morning I, already knew I had a boy, that he was very sick and not expected to live. My husband was still in basic training at the time and was given emergency leave and flown in from Georgia. During this time they were trying to get Steven a bed at a hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit. The hospital we were at didn't have the means to support his life; in fact the anesthesiologist that had taken care of me during the surgery also hand bagged my son all night. He was transferred via life flight to a hospital 2 hours away on the morning Oct. 10th. We were at an Air Force base in California called Edwards Air Force Base. That's where the space shuttle lands when it can't land in Florida because of weather conditions. It just so happens that the Space Shuttle Discovery was landing at the same time as life flight. Now there are strict rules about air traffic in the vicinity of the space shuttle so NASA and the space shuttle’s crew was notified about the life flight that was going to land. For a short period of time it was discussed as to whether or not to send the shuttle around for another orbit of the earth in order for the life flight to land. They fortunately were able to over come the conflicts of air space and landed safely and on time, with in a few minutes of each other.