Cameron’s Birth Story

Cameron’s Birth Story
By Dad, Todd

After having contractions on a pleasant July morning, Stacy’s doctor advised that we go to the hospital to get checked out.  After a quick examination, it was confirmed the baby was on its way, and he was breech.  It was 6 weeks before our due date.  We were worried, but we had no choice.  After a very short prep time, we were brought into the operating room and in a couple minutes out came Cameron.  (We came to a final decision on his name just about 10 minutes before this.)  I saw him get whisked away to the adjoining room and he looked good to me.  He was purple and white, but a good size (5lbs 6oz).

They cleaned him up, put him on oxygen and he turned pink very quickly.  We thought everything went really well.  Then the attending pediatrician came in to tell us that Cameron had some physical characteristics associated with Down syndrome.  The doctor said that he had a gap between his big toe and 2nd toe, his eyes were slightly farther apart then normal, and that he had a Simian line on both hands.  (If you look at most people’s hands, the lines across your palms are split in two.  A Simian line means that there is one line on the hands going straight across).  In any case, the pediatrician said they would need to do a genetic test to confirm their suspicions which was going to take a few days.

That was definitely a LONG week.  Cameron was in the NICU in the meantime because of he was born premature.  Being a researcher, I dove into every medical article I could find about the physical characteristics that the doctor saw trying to figure out the odds of these same things occurring in a typical child.  After 7 days of waiting, the test results came back positive for Down syndrome.  By then we decided to accept whatever the results were, so we were sort of prepared.  Our attending pediatrician and nurse practitioner came to deliver the news to us in the NICU.  I felt bad for our young nurse practitioner.  She looked like she was barely holding it together delivering the news to us. But they were both very positive and encouraging, and we can only hope other new parents have the same experience. We took the news in stride and began to ask questions, mainly, where do we go from here?  What will all of this mean for Cameron and for us as a family?  We had to take one thing at a time.  We wanted to get Cameron out of the NICU first, and then we would deal with his diagnosis.

With a diagnosis like Down syndrome, a parent has every right to feel sad or question why this may have happened.  But after a while you realize that those are unnecessary feelings to continue experiencing.  I think the thing that comforted me the most was something a friend of ours said.  She simply said, “Everybody’s different.”  So whether a person has an extra chromosome or not, it doesn’t matter.  Many people take different paths to achieve their dreams or goals.  How you get there is unique to the individual.  That’s what makes life interesting.  If it was the same for everyone, this would be a pretty boring world.

It was a full 30 days before we were able to take Cameron home from the hospital.  And since then we couldn’t be happier as a family.  Me, Stacy, and his big sister, Alexandra, love Cameron to pieces.  Once you get home from the hospital and have a chance to breathe a little, you realize that there is a lot of information out there on Down Syndrome to digest.  This is why we were so happy to add Gigi’s Playhouse into our life.  It has become a place where we can share our different experiences and information, make friends, and most importantly have fun.