God's Grace: Tiny twins' parents count their blessings

By Kelly Kazek
THE NEWS COURIER (ATHENS, Ala.)

ATHENS, Ala. December 26, 2007 01:51 pm

— When DeeDee Smith was taken to Huntsville Hospital in March to be treated for smoke inhalation after the Athens home she shared with her husband, Randy, burned, she didn’t imagine that trip to the hospital would be one of the luckiest events of her life.
DeeDee, five months pregnant with twins at the time, learned that day from doctors that her babies had little or no amniotic fluid and could be in danger.
If not for that fateful fire, the life-threatening situation may not have been discovered in time.
The Smiths did not know it then, but DeeDee’s life was also at stake.
Within two weeks Randy would be sitting beside her in a Birmingham hospital as she, and the babies, hovered near death.

‘Something I had to do’
DeeDee had lived most of her life as an insulin-dependent diabetic, a serious condition that can lead sufferers to become blind or comatose.
“Ten years ago, I was almost in a coma,” DeeDee said.
Then she learned her condition would make a viable pregnancy difficult. “I had a miscarriage and the doctor advised me it would be in my best interest to never plan on having a child.”
DeeDee and Randy took foster parenting classes so they could foster a child in hopes of adopting.
But as DeeDee’s diabetes stabilized over the years, she couldn’t shake the thought of giving birth to a child. At that time, Randy’s insurance at his job as a industrial painter would not cover the high cost of infertility treatments needed to help the couple become pregnant, so DeeDee still considered adoption their best option.
When Randy went to work as a contractor working on the restart of the Unit 1 reactor at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant, he learned insurance would cover the cost of treatments and DeeDee did not hesitate. She wanted to try to get pregnant.
“It was just something I had to do,” she said.
Randy knew pregnancy would be risky for his wife, but he also did not want her to have regrets.
“If we didn’t try, she would always be looking back and wondering ‘what if?’” he said. “You only get to live one time. As long as you have God in your life, you don’t have to worry and wonder. You go forward with no fear.”
DeeDee checked with the endocrinologist who treated her diabetes.
“I told him I really wanted to give it a shot,” she said. “I had had my diabetes under control for several years.”
After testing her kidneys, her eyes and other organs, the doctor gave his approval.
“He told me we could try for one year,” she said. After that, the intrauterine insemination treatments could affect DeeDee’s health.

Babies on board
The Smiths wouldn’t need a year.
“We got pregnant on the second try,” DeeDee said.
But the risks were high. Fertility treatments often result in multiple births and DeeDee’s diabetes was not the only factor when considering whether she could carry more than one baby: She is a small woman, only 4 feet, 8 inches tall and weighing 119 pounds.
Though the Smiths used the procedure and medications least likely to cause multiples, the couple learned when DeeDee was five weeks pregnant that they would be the parents of twins.
DeeDee said she remained calm.
“I just knew God had given us one chance to do this and it was in His hands,” she said. “I wasn’t afraid. I was shocked. I just knew God’s plan was so much better than mine.”
DeeDee’s mother, Judy Cook of Decatur, was concerned about her daughter’s decision to carry a child and became more worried when she learned her daughter was carrying twins.
“I was there the day they told us it was twins,” she said. “I was nervous, simply because of her size. She is so little, so short.
“I cried a lot when I wasn’t around her,” she said. “I asked God to give me strength. There was fear in knowing what a great possibility it would be that we could lose her.”
But the pregnancy went smoothly except for continued morning sickness until the March 1 house fire, when DeeDee was nearly 22 weeks pregnant.
Though the babies’ heart rates were more rapid than they should be, doctors thought perhaps that was caused by DeeDee’s smoke inhalation.
The doctors at Huntsville Hospital sent DeeDee to Kirkland Clinic in Birmingham to check their heart rates and the lack of amniotic fluid.
When a doctor examined DeeDee there on Friday, March 16, he immediately had her hospitalized at University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital.
DeeDee’s blood sugars were “out of control,” she said, and she was suffering from preeclampsia, a life-threatening increase in blood pressure that can strike 5 to 8 percent of women during pregnancy. But to ensure the safety of the twins, DeeDee needed to carry them until she was 24 weeks pregnant, which was the following Tuesday.
Between Friday and Tuesday, she gained 55 pounds in fluid.
“The three doctors said they knew they didn’t want to take the babies until 24 weeks but they didn’t know how sick I really was until the babies were born,” DeeDee said. “They said it was the worst case of preeclampsia they had ever seen.”
On Wednesday morning, doctors performed an emergency Caesarean and took the tiny babies from DeeDee.
Gabrielle “Gabie” Smith weighed 1 pound, 5 ounces and was 11 inches long.
Gracelynn “Gracie” Smith weighed 1 pound, 3 ounces and was 11.25 inches long.
Barbie dolls are 12 inches long.
After the C-section, DeeDee had one glimpse of her daughters.
“I saw them rolling them by in an incubator,” she said. “Just for a brief second I got to see them.”

Lives in ‘jeopardy’
DeeDee has forgotten many of the details of the next two days.
“We didn’t know if any of the three of us would make it that Thursday,” she said. “All our lives were in jeopardy.”
Randy stayed at DeeDee’s side, praying his daughters and wife would survive.
He had learned he had been laid off from his contractor’s job as shift foreman at the nuclear plant when the second shift was eliminated because the project was nearing completion.
“It was so fast-paced with everything happening, you didn’t really have time to get really scared about it,” he said. “We went to Birmingham to see a doctor and the next thing you know, she’s swelling up and gaining weight.”
His focus had to be on the survival of his wife.
“I knew she was very sick,” Randy said. “I was worried about her.” He also knew his daughters were very sick but he knew he could not help.
“God had to have his hands on that one,” he said. “There wasn’t anything we could do. We wanted the babies but we wanted a mama for them, too.”
By Friday, DeeDee was able to get out of her hospital bed and visit the twins in the neonatal intensive care unit.
“I was so sick myself there was a lot they weren’t telling me,” she said. “In my mind, I just had two healthy babies. I never would have been able to fight myself if I’d known how sick they were.”
She would soon find that although her battle for survival seemed over, the twins still had a long way to go.
The babies were breathing on their own when they were born, which was a good sign because lung development is not complete in extremely premature babies.
“We didn’t know how developed their lungs would be,” DeeDee said.
The couple also was warned the girls might have cerebral palsy or mental impairment.
“Doctors told us they might have no quality of life,” DeeDee said.
The Smiths were told their daughters would be hospitalized in Birmingham’s neonatal unit for several months.
People at their church, Truth Baptist of Athens, arranged with the Baptist Association for the Smiths to use an apartment in housing near the hospital. The Association helps fund housing there for that purpose, Randy said. Though the Smiths still paid partial rent —while still paying to maintain their home in Athens — people from area Baptist churches helped with expenses and often brought meals to the apartment.
“They take care of all your needs,” Randy said. “They cooked meals, called us several times a week and took us to church for four months. That was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Randy and Cook took shifts at the hospital to enable Randy to get a temporary job. A business manager with his union found him work at Miller’s Steam Plant in Birmingham so the family would have some income.

By God’s grace
In the meantime, the Smiths had more good news. The babies did not suffer “brain bleeds” as many premature babies do, and the couple had hope that the girls may have normal mental function.
Cook said the babies were almost too tiny to believe.
“I went down and there laid two little bodies,” she said. “You knew they were babies but it just didn’t register that little, bitty thing was a baby.”
Although DeeDee and Randy were allowed to hold the babies from time to time, Cook said she did not get to hold her granddaughters until Mother’s Day.
“Then they took me to each floor to hold my granddaughters,” she said.
After DeeDee stabilized, she too moved to the apartment and the family lived near their tiny babies until their release: Gracie on June 21 and Gabie on July 10, which was her initial due date.
“The day we finally got the last one out and brought them home was tremendous,” Cook said.
The girls, who were nine months old on Friday, are developmentally like five-month-old babies, DeeDee said. Gabie now weighs 12 pounds, 9 ounces and is 22 1/2 inches long. Gracie weighs 11 pounds, 1 ounce and is 24 inches long.
“They are perfectly healthy except they’ve had some acid reflux and it’s going away,” she said.
As the family prepared to celebrate the babies’ first Christmas, they counted their blessings.
“It’s been wonderful,” DeeDee said. “It’s also been hard. Our church family has been so wonderful. They brought us a check for Christmas.”
Randy recently completed another temporary job but the only permanent jobs would mean working out of town. The family is still trying to pay medical expenses as well as day-to-day living expenses on Randy’s unemployment pay.
“We’re hoping after the first of year…” DeeDee said. “We’re hanging on to prayers. We’re doing it day by day and hanging on by God’s grace.”

Kelly Kazek writes for The News Courier in Athens, Ala.

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