|
Registered User
Join Date: Oct 2000
Posts: 22,755
Thanks: 1,135
Thanked 2,411 Times in 1,501 Posts
|
Sextuplets Born in Wichita
We've been following this story here since January. We had another mutiple birth just before this one. Four babies born to the Tetricks. Really amazing odds. The quads were not with fertility drugs they were two identical twins that happened naturally. You might have seen them on TV.
I'm just glad they weren't born in same hospital. Names too similiar.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted on Mon, Apr. 08, 2002
Sextuplets, mom rest after long day
Sondra Headrick is expected to go home this week. The babies will stay longer.
By Roy Wenzl
The Wichita Eagle
Travis Heying
Sondra Headrick reads the morning paper while her husband Eldon talks on the phone to relatives Sunday morning, one day after Sondra successfully delivered sextuplets. Sondra was feeling tired and was ordred by her doctor, Van Bohman, to spend the day resting and recovering from yesterday's delivery.
The six Headrick babies and their mother were doing well Sunday, a day after a birth that thrilled family, doctors and nurses.
Four of the children were breathing with minimal assistance. All six were in serious condition, but Sondra Headrick's high-risk pregnancy specialist said that was expected, given that they reached only the 31st week of the 40-week human pregnancy cycle.
Sondra did not sleep much Saturday night after her Caesarean birth at Via Christi Regional Medical Center-St. Joseph Campus. Despite exhaustion and pain from the surgery, she began producing breast milk Saturday night, which was fed to her daughter, Melissa.
"She's trying to be supermom," Sondra's doctor, Van R. Bohman, said Sunday. "She's trying to do everything she can to help the babies. And I'm telling her to back off."
She needs to rest more, he said.
Asked at a news conference Sunday whether the Headrick family needed assistance from the community, Bohman said that Eldon and Sondra "have not solicited anything, which I think is a great credit to them. They're not trying to milk this for all it's worth."
Although they haven't asked for help, they definitely need it, he said. The financial burden of raising the sextuplets along with daughter Aubrianna, 4, will be steep.
Bohman said he might release Sondra from the hospital in three to four days, if she rests enough. That will only mean, however, that she will become a visitor rather than a patient. The six Headrick babies will probably stay in the neonatal intensive care unit for four to five weeks.
But Bohman is predicting that, against all odds, all six babies will not only survive, but thrive without the physical defects associated with most premature births.
How this happened, when other multiple births often have sadder endings, is the story of a courageous, determined mother, Bohman said. No one, not even Bohman, thought she would carry the sextuplets to 31 weeks, a time when they had a chance to be born without defects.
Sondra herself has said she's not the whole story.
"There are three things a mother needs if she ever finds herself in my situation," she said Friday.
"She has to have determination, she has to have faith, and she has to have a great doctor.
"I have a truly great doctor.
"He was just so smart about how he did the medical things," she said. "But he also let me have some say over how I handled my bed rest, and that allowed me to cope with this mentally."
From the beginning, when he took over her care in October, Bohman said the odds were against a good outcome.
Nearly all sextuplet births result in death to some or all of the babies, or in birth defects including cerebral palsy. Premature birth is the cause.
Bohman said all along that he thought he'd be doing well if he could get Sondra to 27 weeks. Normal gestation is 40 weeks, but that's an impossibility in a sextuplet pregnancy.
The human body isn't designed to take on what he called "six little troublemakers."
What Bohman did to extend Sondra's pregnancy amounted to a complicated balancing act between her well-being and the babies'.
He deliberately put a terrific strain on Sondra's body.
He gave her injections to artificially boost her blood supply to carry more oxygen to her babies.
He injected her with steroids so that the babies' growing bodies, especially their lungs, would develop more rapidly.
He injected her with proteins. He injected her with anti-contraction medications since early March. He ordered her to nearly complete bed rest since November, a move that put her at risk of forming blood clots from lack of exercise. He hospitalized her Jan 3 to supervise her bed rest.
The blood-clot risk forced Bohman in mid-March to begin giving her a blood thinner. That carried an additional risk.
During a Caesarean delivery, there was a risk that she might begin hemorrhaging, an outcome that would be aggravated by the blood-thinning drug.
All of those moves, he said, carried risks for the mother, risks Sondra said she was willing to take.
Doubling her body's blood supply, for example, posed the risk of congestive heart failure -- the strain on her heart from pumping double the blood supply would be considerable.
Weeks ago, Bohman had said that he needed to give the babies the best chance possible by putting as much of a strain on Sondra's body as she could take. The trick, he said, would be in not going too far.
And because there is so little research available on sextuplet pregnancies, what defined "going too far" would be unknown, he said.
"There was some risk in doing all these things," Bohman said Friday. "But what it bought us is the last month of this pregnancy."
But Bohman didn't limit himself to the medical aspects of her case, Sondra said.
He allowed her many little joys during her bed rest at the hospital: trips in a wheelchair outside the hospital, to sit in the sun. Trips to a recreation room, where she was allowed to play table tennis. He allowed her to hold her 4-year- old, who liked to bounce on her bed in the room.
"There's at least one person in my life who doesn't really know that much about medical things but who likes him enough that she talks about Dr. Bohman all the time," Sondra said Friday. "She really, really likes him."
She was talking about Aubrianna.
On Saturday afternoon, after the delivery, Bohman and other hospital staffers were gathered in a conference room, eating sandwiches and celebrating a sextuplet delivery that could have turned out much worse.
The door opened, and members of Sondra and Eldon Headrick's families came in. Aubrianna, who looked exhausted, saw the doctor sitting in a corner. She bolted toward him.
Bohman reached out. The girl jumped into his arms.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
I am so glad I had mine one at a time *L* I am not sure what I would do with a whole litter at once! *L* (Beg very loudly for HELP?) *G* Very neat story ----- what a life those babies are all going to have! 
Linear Mode
