It's scheduled. Surgery number 6. Cole has had more surgeries than birthdays in his short little life. Even though this surgery is just to put tubes in his ears, it still breaks my heart. With each surgery as I hand him over to the doctor I just want to say, "Please, Please, realize that you hold the most important child that you will ever work on, becasue this is my son."
Our journey with Cole has been quite challanging, but I wouldnt change any of it for anything.
When the nurse first told me I was pregnant, I felt like I was drowning. I could not hold back the wave of emotions that was flooding over me. But the feeling that was stealing the breath from my body was fear. What had I just gotten myself into? My husband and I had been trying to conceive for almost a year, and now I wished I could take it back. I knew our lives were going to change 180 degrees. Was our relationship going to suffer? How could we afford the added expenses of a baby? Would I return to work after? These were questions that we supposedly had answers to already, but now that I was actually pregnant, I wasn’t so sure. Had we thought things through well enough? However, once I began to settle into the idea that the two of us was soon to become the three of us, I got excited. In fact, I could not wait for our new life to begin. I wanted our baby now. I dreamt each night of holding the precious little child that my husband and I created. Were we going to have a boy or a girl? Who would our baby look like? Would he or she be more like his mom and love to read and write, or would he be more like his father and love sports and movies? Was our baby going to be healthy and perfect? It was the question that plagued me most. In between doctor visits I worried something was wrong. I cried myself to sleep many nights thinking about it. In the morning I chalked it up to crazy pregnancy hormones, but the nagging feeling just never subsided. Each time I heard my growing baby’s heart beat, relief settled in that everything was fine. But it was only temporary. Days later the worrying would begin again.
At 19 weeks I went to the hospital for my first ultrasound. The drowning feeling returned. I was excited to see my baby, apprehensive about whether we would be blessed with a girl or a boy and trying to fight the persistent feeling that something was wrong. The moment the technician placed the wand on my belly, I knew we were having a little boy. My husband was thrilled. We watched in amazement our son kicking and wiggling as she took measurements and pointed out his lungs, heart, kidneys, hands and feet, eyes nose and mouth. As she left the room to get the doctor she smiled and said, “What a good looking little boy.” I couldn’t agree more, although I thought our son looked a bit like a lion.
In the few minutes my husband and I had alone waiting for the doctor we both expressed our joy that everything was fine. Our baby was healthy and perfect. We both had tears in our eyes when the doctor entered the room. He introduced himself and turned on the ultrasound. I was excited to see our son again. My excitement quickly turned to panic as he looked at our little boy’s heart and said, “Well, his heart is not the problem.” Problem? Problem?! What problem? There is no problem! In the following eternities of silence I managed to convince myself that the doctor didn’t mean it the way it sounded. What he had meant to say was that there was no problem with his heart. I began to relax and even enjoy myself again. Eventually the doctor turned off the monitor and began to talk. With a deep breath he explained that he was seeing a black line across our son’s lip and try as he might, he could not seem to make it go away. He talked about genetics and how sometimes things don’t always develop right. He asked if either of us had a family history of cleft lip or palate. No. Of course not. Why was he asking? He believed our son had a cleft lip. I believed he was wasting my time with all his nonsense. As he continued to talk, I continued to tune him out. Finally as he was explaining that with one birth defect the chances that there may be more are elevated, thus the need to schedule several follow up ultrasounds, it hit me; our son looked like a lion because he had a cleft lip. It was true. I was drowning again. I couldn’t control the emotions. I couldn’t stop the tears. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t…I couldn’t…I just couldn’t.
The nagging feeling that something was wrong disappeared. I now knew what was wrong, but it took time to accept it. My husband and I spent hours researching everything we could about cleft lips and palates. We learned about different types of clefts, the techniques and special bottles needed to feed infants with clefts and the surgeries required to correct it. The more we learned the more I worried. I was nervous to tell people not everything was perfect with our little boy. I worried about what strangers at the grocery store would say and what people at church would think. I worried about taking pictures of our precious boy before his lip was fixed and what he would think of it when he grew older. I worried about out infant son going under general anesthesia and feeding him post surgery. Most of all, I worried that God had made a mistake sending this special boy to me because I certainly was not strong enough to handle all of this.
We returned to the hospital ten days later for our second ultrasound. Despite his complete lack of cooperation—putting his hands up to his mouth and turning his head away—we confirmed that our baby had a cleft lip. The doctor told us we would not know for sure about the palate until he was born.
At 12:30 AM the morning of April 1, 2004, my water broke. Our son was on his way. For the first time in months I wasn’t worried. Ten hours and only three pushes later, Cole Gregory Sadler made his screaming entrance into the world. He had a cleft lip and palate, but he was healthy and perfect.
