3 minute read
Born Perfect
B orn Per fe ct
I wasn’t prepared for the fact that my son would have a cleft lip and palate, but now I see his smile as one of the greatest gifts.
Advertisement
by TA R A L U S T B E R G / illustration by A N N E B E N T L E Y
IT WAS M Y birthday. The last thing I’d ever want to share with anyone. But what I wanted and what I got were two totally different things.
At my 39-week checkup the day before I would turn 36, my blood pressure was very high and my ob-gyn sent me home on bed rest. My husband, Will, and my then 4-year-old son, Noah, wished me a happy birthday with hugs and kisses that morning as I lay confined to bed. As directed, I called my ob-gyn for test results. He diagnosed me with preeclampsia and ordered an emergency cesarean later that day.
I’d been through this before. I’d had an emergency C-section four years earlier when Noah was born with the umbilical cord around his neck. So I thought I knew what to expect.
The atmosphere in the operating room was joyful. The nurses even started singing “Happy Birthday” as the doctor began the cesarean.
“Ahh! It’s a … ” the doctor said as he pulled my baby boy out of me—but then he just went quiet. There was deafening silence. The doctor signaled to a nurse to come take the baby. No one said a word.
“What’s going on?” I demanded, while the rest of the room stared. The baby started crying, but I still hadn’t seen him.
I was near hysterics because I did not know what was happening. “What is wrong with my baby?” I remember screaming. My doctor composed himself and said, “Well … umm … he’s fine. We didn’t see this on any of your sonograms, but there appears to be a slight cleft.”
A cleft what? Lip? Palate? Slight? Like unnoticeable? I had only heard bad stories about clefts and thought, “What did I do wrong during my pregnancy to cause this? But he did say ‘slight,’ right?”
After examining the baby, the pediatrician came over to me and asked, “Do you want to see your baby?”
“Yes! What kind of question is that? Give me my baby!” I yelled, still on the operating table.
“Okay, but please understand that what you’re going to see may be shocking if you weren’t expecting it,” she warned. She handed the baby to my husband first. Will took the baby into his arms, still just out of my view, and started to cry. He kept repeating, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” When he bent down and showed me our son’s face, I blacked out.
I woke up in recovery, not sure whether what had happened was real. The baby wasn’t with me. My doctor pulled up a chair and started by saying, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how we missed this on the ultrasound. It appears to be a complete, unilateral cleft.” So much for slight. “But don’t worry,” he continued. “With a simple surgery, they can fix it right up and you won’t be able to tell … ”
I couldn’t stop all the questions popping up in my head. A “simple surgery?” I’d known someone who had a child with a cleft palate, and it didn’t seem like a “simple surgery.”
“Was this something you could even pick up on an ultrasound?” I had been
