Miracle Baby

When I was growing up I remember hearing from my mother that I was a miracle baby, but it didn’t mean that much to me as a child.  I learnt that I was a placenta previa birth and I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck three times.  Discussing it with my mother, when I was older, she told me that when I was born the staff took me and just put me aside as dead. They continued to work on my mother who was hemorrhaging badly at the time. I woke up, however, and squawked which alerted them. So a couple of the nurses turned and started working on me as well!

It wasn’t just my actual birth but my mother’s pregnancy was also punctuated with a series of very extraordinary circumstances. My mother said she knew she was pregnant with me, her fifth child, even though her periods continued up until the 5th month.  On a visit to her doctor she told him that she was pregnant but he wouldn’t believe her. My mother insisted that after having four children she believed she would have a fair idea of knowing whether she was pregnant or not.  So he said, they would take a blood test, but if the blood test came back negative saying she wasn’t pregnant, she had to agree to get psychiatric help.  Mum agreed. 

The day came for my mother to go back to the doctors and find out the results of the blood test.  The doctor had an envelope on his desk. Before he opened it he made her promise again that she would agree to getting psychiatric care, if this test said she was not pregnant.  This time my mother cheerfully agreed.  The doctor opened up the paperwork, read it, and my mother guessed the results from the way his jaw fell open in disbelief.  She was pregnant alright! 

So the placenta was born ahead of me. I entered the world with umbilical cord wrapped around my neck three times.  The placenta is the baby’s source of oxygen. Strangled by own lifelong. When a baby is born this way they normally don’t survive or are saddled with life complications like cerebral palsy or any variations of brain injury caused by asphyxia. This was especially common back in 1963, particularly in a remote hospital in Lae, Papua New Guinea where I was born.

Mum told me she felt all along that I was going to have a ‘difficult time’ and prayed all throughout her pregnancy for her baby. I would say that Our Father in Heaven surely heard my mother’s prayers, and gave her the miracle she somehow knew she needed for her baby. In fact, the day after I was born, a photo of my mother with me on her lap was on the front page of the local Lae newspaper.  The article’s title was in large bold print: Miracle Baby!

Mel's story