An Eventful Day

I suspect I'm not the first, first-time father to express this sentiment, but oh my god, am I tired! I made a list of five to-dos today and only managed to finish one: I called my dad. Welcome to parenthood, I suppose. At any rate, I've been mentally composing a number of posts today, and I thought I'd simply combine them into one monster entry. Here goes: the first day in the life of Samuel...

Hey, I Just Got Born!

So right after Samuel was born, he was immediately cared for by a virtual army of neo-natologists. There were (no joke) 12 people in the birthing room at one time. Within the first ten minutes, he was foot- and hand-printed, measured, swaddled and on his way to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at University Hospital. Kristin and I did get to hold him for a few minutes, which was nice, but it didn't last near long enough. Kristin had to stay in the room for after care, while I accompanied Samuel to the NICU (check out his cute little feet while he has an umbilical line placed!). After awhile, the echocardiogram technician arrived, and it was time for Kristin and I to have some late, late dinner and what turned out to be the briefest of naps...

From the NICU to the CICU


Kristin woke me up out of a dead sleep because the doctors had decided Wolfie's oxygen saturation levels were too high, and so he needed to be taken over to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) at neighboring Children's Hospital right away. What followed was definitely the most surreal part of the evening. When I arrived at the NICU at around 1:55 a.m., I was treated to a scene that a friend of mine suggested came straight from The Matrix. They try to get you ready for all the tubes and wires, but my imagination was utterly lacking in comparison to the reality of it all. I mean, just look at the contraption they had to use just to get him from University to Children's, a mere three-minute ambulance ride away! The middle picture best summarizes my impressions of the whole thing; I'm amazed I was even able to snap these photos from my cell phone in my stupor. Anyway, sometime between 2 and 4 a.m. we arrived safely at the CICU. All was well, and Samuel and I slept...

How he's doing now

I was woken up in a heartbeat at 6:58 to the sound of alarms. Little Wolfie had stopped breathing. Evidently, the prostaglandins that are keeping his heart temporarily viable can also cause an apneic side effect. Happily, I did not have time to panic because by the time I woke up enough to understand what had happened, there were eight doctors and nurses in the room, one of whom was able to get him breathing again very quickly. After he stabilized, I got to spend some time holding him. It was amazing: joyful and terrifying. Wolfie was still alive, but he will have to endure more and more difficult struggles in the future. Here's hoping he (and we) have enough fight in us to overcome all such moments...

Meet Wolfie Leclaire!

Kristin and I are amazingly excited to welcome our new baby boy to the world! Samuel Jerry "Wolfie" Leclaire was born at 8:52 p.m. on March 16, 2011. He weighs 7 lbs. 4 oz, but due to other prioritized procedures, we do not have a length measurement yet. Regardless, this may be the first time I've said "Happy Birthday" to someone and actually meant it. Happy Birthday, Wolfie!

More details and pictures to follow...

Making Progress...

You see that smile? That's the smile of my wife, a woman whose water broke, whose contractions started in earnest, and who just said goodbye to the anesthesiologist who delivered the sweet joy of an epidural!

We're not in the home-stretch yet, but one hurdle is down anyway. While we're hoping that means that baby will come soon, we will remain patient, happily pain-free, and anxious to meet the little wolfman.

It has begun!

This is a post from Jason. It's my first personal post on a blog ever, so be patient if I break blogging etiquette. This morning, while I was in the middle of teaching Heart of Darkness to my 2nd period class, I got "the call." So sure enough, I dropped Conrad, and a few hours later Kristin and I were at the hospital in early labor (well, she was). While it is still very early in the process and contractions are still comparatively small, the doctors are taking a "more conservative approach" than usual and keeping us here; they want all the right personnel in the right place at the right time. At any rate, here we are: hurrying up to wait. We'll keep you posted...

Our Story

Last July at a routine checkup, my doctor surprised and thrilled my husband and me by telling us that we were pregnant. Our excitement, however, had some serious anxiety to contest with.

Just six months before, we had lost our first baby at 20 weeks of gestation to a rare chromosomal disorder called triploidy; it’s a sporadic occurrence that happens at conception, causing the baby to develop with an extra set of chromosomes in every cell of her body. Unfortunately, it is “incompatible with life,” as the doctors say, and our baby had no chance of survival. When we delivered her, we named her “Hope”—one of the most beautiful words in the English language, in our opinion—and as we faced the routine chromosomal testing of our new baby over the next 20 weeks, we held onto hope tightly.

This fall, the new baby—temporarily named “Wolfie” by our students—passed the initial chromosomal tests with flying colors. When we hit the big 20 week ultrasound, however, we once again encountered a quiet ultrasound technician, a silent shuffle into a small conference room with tissues, and a grave-faced doctor informing us that she had some bad news: “Wolfie” had a very rare and serious heart defect called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. The world stopped for a moment.

When it started again, my husband and I were holding onto each other’s arms and trying to absorb the many differences between the color-coded pictures of normal hearts and the diagram of our baby’s defective heart. The only thing I could understand at the time was this: The entire left side of my baby’s heart didn’t work and would never work, and he would need life-saving open heart surgeries to have a chance at survival.

At the end of the conference, the doctor gave us four options:

1.Wolfie could have three risky open-heart surgeries. The first would take place in the first week of his life, the second at six months, and the third at two years of age. These surgeries would systematically reroute the blood flow so that the right side of his heart would do the work of both sides.

2.If Wolfie were not a good candidate for this surgery, he could be put on a list for a heart transplant.

3.We could give Wolfie comfort care when he was born so that he could pass away peacefully.

4.We could terminate the pregnancy immediately.

We drove home in silence.

My husband spent the rest of the weekend in that silence while I attacked the internet with manic energy. Being a high school English teacher, I desperately needed some control and structure. So I researched Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome on every medical website and personal blog I could find. I watched videos of the three surgeries. I dug into the statistics of University of Colorado Children’s Hospital (we live in Littleton, CO) and was encouraged by its highly ranked pediatric cardiology department. I discovered that Wolfie roughly had an 80% chance of surviving the first surgery and a 90% chance of surviving each of the subsequent surgeries. I found stories of many parents who had lost their babies to HLHS, and I cried for them, and I also found many stories of HLHS babies who had thrived. Often, I thought about Hope.

My husband and I grieved deeply as we started to understand our baby’s illness, but we also realized one important thing: where there was no possibility of survival for Hope, Wolfie has a fighting chance.

This blog is dedicated to his fight and to everyone who would like to be a part of it.

--Kristin and Jason Leclaire


Here's a picture of the little guy at 37 weeks. He's now due in less than one week.