Family -- Wow!

Moogie and Pepper are thrilled to announce the arrival of grandson John Michael  (“Jack”) on Thursday, July 26, 2012, at 11:55 a.m.. He weighed in at 8 lbs 3oz, and stretched 21″.  (Big, healthy boy!).

We finally got them out of the hospital and home yesterday.

It seems that Moogie passed along a bizarre genetic defect to Elder Daughter that allows the placenta to grow into the uterus, and usually that means that a part of the placenta gets torn off and remains there after birth, to be sloughed days later.  For Moogie, having a positive Rh factor, this was mostly an inconvenience plus a little extra cramping and excessive blood loss. For Elder Daughter, however, it was a bit more problematic.

It also seems that Pepper passed along a negative Rh factor to Elder Daughter, but she didn’t pass it along to Jack.  That meant that the retained placenta fragment was leaking Rh Positive fetal cells into her bloodstream. All that, added together, caused a perfect storm threatening to reject future pregnancies that involve an Rh+ fetus.

So, after consults with specialists and professors and colleagues, the docs kept Elder Daughter hospitalized, and did a DNC on Sunday to remove what they then assumed was the last of not-sloughed retained placenta to stop the flow of Rh positive fetal cells. That turned out to be good all the way around, even if it did send Moogie into weepy spasms because her seriously fatigued and weak 31year old baby girl was going under general anesthesia; the DNC stopped a week-long, in essence, labor trying to get rid of that last bit of placenta. And it gave them more time to wage the Rh war.

To win that war, Elder Daughter would have to endure additional RhoGRAM injections of a bazillion CCs, every 6 hours, for 42 hours.  Fortunately, the injections could be administered by IV push instead of shots (fortunate because tthe shots apparently really hurt!).

It turned out that the Rh numbers after the last planned injection were nearly perfect, but not 100%, so the docs decided to give her one last dose of the R stuff on Tuesday.  But they didn’t make her stay in the hospital or go to their office to do another analysis of her blood levels because they were confident that all will be well.

So, Elder Daughter’s new family got to go home Tuesday afternoon to introduce the canine children to the human child.  As Moogie remarked, the pups have a new pet!

No one on the maternity floor, or within the doctors’ experience, had ever experienced a rising measure of positive numbers postpartum following a few extra doses of RhoGRAM. Daughter’s nurses had never experienced administering more than one RhoGRAM shot to an Rh- mom, and Daughter experienced  a total of seventeen. So, it looks like the arrival of Baby Jack will be documented in medical literature.  The docs are already gathering data to help defuse future perfect storms for many Rh- people.  And that’s a good thing.