Alison

Alison was born on October 7, 1977 at 3:36 a.m.. She weighed 7 pounds 6 ounces.

She was a full term baby with no complications during the pregnancy or labor.

When I found out that I was pregnant with this baby, I was a little overwhelmed. I had three other children, the oldest was four at the time. I really didn't know how I as going to care for this new addition. This feeling changed to anticipation and joy as the birth got closer, even though I still felt challenged.

At Alison's birth, everything looked just great. Other than being posterior, everything was normal. She was a good healthy birth size, had dark hair and more hair than any of our other children had. She was a beautiful baby. We had prearranged to have a short hospital stay, provided all was fine with me and the baby. It was , so we went home after a few hours. The first few weeks Alison was a happy, seemingly normal baby, doing all the things that the other babies had done. Surprisingly to me, I was having an easy time adjusting to the new baby. The rest of the family was enjoying her immensely too. We were all very happy to have this new baby girl. At 6 weeks of age I took her in for her '6 weeks' check up. It seemed almost like a formality since all was going well. I was planning to get her immunizations started and then get back to the chores waiting at home. When I got to the doctor, he was concerned because she was a bit jaundiced. She had an almost olive complexion. I thought she was going to have a complexion like my mother. I must admit, my husband and I were both a bit jaundice naive. We hadn't had any problems with jaundice with the other babies, (almost every other baby since has had some jaundice at birth though). The other thing that we found was wrong was her stool color. It had always been very light. I thought that it was just one of her individual characteristics, every child is different. If her stool color had changed dramatically I think I would have been concerned, but I didn't know that the color in the stool comes from the bile. If there is no bile, there is no color. This we found out with the events of the next few days. Dr. Lewis was the greatest and really gave Alison a chance to live because he wasn't arrogant. He wasn't sure exactly what all of this meant so he called some other doctors to get some feed back. He found out immediately that this was not something that he could NOT handle and he referred us to a doctor at a children's hospital. As we found out a little later, most doctors were unaware of Alison's condition and didn't know what all of the symptoms meant.

When we went to the Children's hospital the first time, the doctor, Dr. Matlak, was very understanding and open with us. He told us that we first had to have a lot of tests to find out exactly what the problem was. They had pinpointed the problem to be in the liver but there are hundreds of possible liver problems. They knew that it was the liver because of the elevated bilirubin and the light stool color. Alison was checked into the hospital and they began testing. The tests were hard on her, as well as us having to watch her go through them. As I talked to other parents in the hospital with their sick babies, they couldn't believe that anything was wrong with her. She looked so perfect and beautiful. When the tests were complete the verdict was that she had a condition called Biliary Atresia. This meant that she had a blockage of the bile ducts inside the liver. There was a surgery that needed to be performed and it couldn't be done after the child was about two or three months of age. They needed to do the surgery immediately. During the surgery, they would have to cut into the liver with microscopic sections and then check each piece for any open bile ducts. When, or if, they found any open bile ducts, they would resection a part of her intestines onto her liver. This was a very tricky, delicate surgery. As we were given all of the chances for survival, there were a number of different stats given but the bottom line chance of survival was only about 5 percent. That seemed very slim, and it is, but we needed to take any chance that we had to save our baby. She went to surgery just before the age of 2 months, about a week after entering the hospital.

In the surgery, which took about 6 hours, they cut the small sections of the her liver and, in time, did find open bile ducts. They resectioned a part of her intestines to her liver, which gave her an open tube directly from her liver. This would be easy for the bile to drain but also easy for bacteria to go up to the liver to then plug it shut again. We would find more out about all of that, in time. I will never forget the way she looked when she came out of surgery. It was something that, for a mother or father, was excruciating. She looked like she had died and the machines were just moving her chest up and down. That's essentially what was going on.

As she recovered, she did very well. She drained bile within days and looked very good. The doctors had told us that she was draining bile even faster that the babies that had survived. We were ecstatic that she was recovering so well. We had a lot of faith that she would be alright. During the surgery and the following week I had to stop nursing Alison, they had to give her a pre-digested formula so that she could use the food more easily. I wanted to nurse her again and the doctor encouraged me to also, mothers milk is much easier to digest and easier on the body. When she came out of intensive care we again felt encouraged. She continued to make steady progress.

I'll go into the feelings that went with these experiences next month.

And since this is Christmas time, this brings me to our favorite Christmas story.

The best Christmas that we ever had started on December 24, 1977, Christmas Eve. That was the day that Alison came home from the hospital. All of our kids were with us, together, something that we wondered about ever happening. We were so happy. We woke up on Christmas morning with our whole family at home around us.

Alison was the best gift that anyone got that year. It brought to us, in a greater degree, the true meaning of Christmas, which is LOVE. We felt so much joy and thankfulness that we had this sweet baby home. All of the other presents were secondary. Our Father in Heaven had given us this special gift and we were truly blessed.