For the Baby Who Fought to Be Here
It's 2 a.m. and I'm sitting up in the dark with a hairbrush, dragging the bristles across the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. Not because it helps — nothing helps — but because the itch of cholestasis doesn't live on the surface where you can reach it. It lives underneath. The same movie is on a loop — Unstoppable, for the third night running, because I love my husband dearly, but, Chris Pine, am I right? And sleep isn't coming anyway. I'm somewhere past thirty weeks, and I'm counting.
I've had intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy with every single one of my babies.
If you've never heard of it, that's fair — it's rare. In the US it's about one or two in every thousand pregnancies. It runs much higher in a few places — Chile, Scandinavia — and among Latina moms. Here's what it does: bile stops flowing the way it's supposed to, so it backs up into your blood — which is exactly as gross as it sounds — and the first thing you notice is the itching — classically in the palms and the soles, worse at night, usually in the third trimester, often with no rash to show for it. It tends to run in families, but plenty of us are the first anyone knows of. Like me. No one in mine ever had it. And here's the part that turns it from gross to genuinely terrifying: high bile acids raise the risk of stillbirth, and they can keep a baby's lungs from finishing on time. There's no dependable way to watch it hour by hour from the outside. So they check your levels, and they take the baby early. That's the whole plan: deliver this baby before we come in more than 15mph through the Stanton curve. If you've seen Unstoppable, you get it. If you haven't — spoiler.
So you count.
Every night before bed I drank a tall glass of orange juice, cold and fast, and then I lay still and waited to feel a kick. The sugar would wake the baby, the baby would move, and for that one minute I would know. Toward the end it was day by day. Nothing about today told me tomorrow would be fine. So I drank the juice, and I felt the kick, and I made it to morning, and I did it again.
The doctors sat me down and explained what liver failure would look like if it came to that. They used words like jaundice, told me I might turn orange. I nodded. But I was never really listening for me. I'd go in every single day and tell them I hadn't felt the baby move — sometimes true, sometimes not — because if I said it, they'd hook me up to the monitor, and I'd get to hear the heartbeat and know for one more day that we were still okay.
With my son — the one who ended up in the NICU — my levels got bad enough that they induced me at thirty-four weeks. Even that early he was five pounds, eleven ounces, but his lungs hadn't finished. He stopped breathing the moment he was born — his heart never stopped, not for one second — and then he was gone, carried down the hall before I ever got to hold him. His first week was inside an incubator in a quiet private room. After that they moved us out to what felt like the NICU version of gen pop: the big open room lined with cribs and genuinely amazing on-shift nurses. Because that's what the NICU is, if I'm honest — a sentence. You're doing time, and nobody can tell you the length. Every single day, I was waiting for my son to be cleared to come home. It's such an odd feeling because while you are stressed and constantly worried, you're also incredibly grateful to be serving the time, every second of it, because the alternative is absolutely devastating and unimaginable.
He had siblings waiting at home — one of them a sister barely eleven months older — and we lived an hour away. So the days went: drop the older kids at daycare, drive the hour, and go straight to him. I hooked my DVD player up to his crib, dragged the recliner alongside it, and held him from eight until five — coaxing bottle after bottle, willing the ounces into him one at a time. I ached for those hours. I loved every single minute, and every single minute went too fast. And every evening I had to put him down and drive the hour home, because I needed to be there for them too. That was the real ache of it — not the leaving, but the being split. I was torn between my children every single day. Then dinner, homework, baths, bed, and up to do it all again. Twenty-one days before they finally let us take him home.
Here's the part I hold onto: the baby they worried about grew right off their charts — literally off the curve, in the best possible way. Six foot two, top of his class, and a genuinely good athlete — the kind of kid who clears the outfield fence and leaves you standing there remembering that he came into this world at five pounds and couldn't breathe on his own. If you met him, you would never guess how he started.
I prayed the entire time. In the dark with the brush, over the juice, in the NICU chair — constantly. Not because it was all I had left, but because I believe. Because I have faith.
And this is something I love about being Catholic: beyond the Holy Trinity and our Blessed Mother — the ones you always turn to — we have specialists. Saints who lived real lives and now pray for us, each one you can call on by name for the exact thing you're facing. There were saints for precisely what I was walking through. I just didn't know their names yet. If I had, I'd have called on them constantly.
That's where this line comes from.
St. Gerard Majella is the saint Catholic mothers have prayed to for safe delivery for more than two centuries. Going into each pregnancy — especially once I knew that for me, the cholestasis was always coming — he's the one I would have held onto. He's for the carrying, the waiting, the whole long stretch of loving a baby you're terrified to lose. And St. Raymond Nonnatus — who was himself delivered against every odds, and whom Catholic tradition holds as a patron of newborns — is the one we hold up for the babies who fought to be here. For the ones in the incubator. For the small bodies and the long hours and the parent in the chair who can't do anything but stay.
I wish I had something like this then. While you are surrounded by so many people, this journey can still feel so lonely — and it is important to remember you aren't alone. Because when there's nothing left to do but pray, it helps to hold the prayer in your hands.
That's all this is. A prayer you can hold.
Cradle this little one.
Saint Raymond Nonnatus, pray for us.
