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When he was born June 21, Silas McCloskey’s arms were thinner than his mother’s index finger. He fit inside her hand, with his legs resting just below her wrist. He got his first taste of milk on the end of a Q-tip.

And yet, says Robin McCloskey, he was just perfect. Every feature, down to his tiny fingernails.

His family calls Silas the “miracle baby,” and that covers a lot — how he was conceived, the fact that he survived a very early birth at a very low birth weight, and that he overcame multiple illnesses in those early months. But the miracle they’re celebrating this Thanksgiving is simply this: Silas is home.

“I just can’t believe he’s finally here,” Robin says.

Robin McCloskey should never have gotten pregnant in the first place. Her husband, Rick, had a vasectomy eight years ago, after their youngest daughter, Jayla, was born. They had their family as they wanted it: Elisha, 12, and Jayla, 9. “I was done,” she says.

So when she started feeling sick on a cruise just after New Year’s, she thought she had a sinus infection. She got treated for the infection, but still felt lousy.

“I’m always moving, moving, moving,” says the aerobics instructor and personal trainer, snapping her fingers. “And I had no energy.”

When her doctor asked if there was any chance she could be pregnant, she said, “Absolutely not.” So they tested her for uterine cancer. Pre-menopause. Nobody could figure out what was wrong.

“Then two weeks later, Jan. 29, we had some people coming over, and I went downstairs where we had one of those Glade plug-ins. I got one whiff, and I was immediately sick.

“Ricky said, 'Robin, that’s what it was like when you were pregnant.’”

Though she didn’t believe it, Robin bought a home pregnancy test. It came up positive. Immediately.

“Ricky, you’re gonna be a daddy again,” Robin said.

They both went to their doctors on the following Monday. “I’m 10 weeks pregnant,” Robin told Rick. “And I’ve got live swimmers,” Rick told Robin. Tests confirmed that Rick’s vasectomy had reversed itself.

It was a hard adjustment.

“I cried for three days,” Robin says. “I’m 43, Rick is 48. I thought I was too old. It was not what I planned. It was not what I anticipated.”

She remained conflicted in her feelings about the pregnancy, right up to the day her doctor walked in after an ultrasound. “There are issues,” he began.
In that instant, she knew absolutely and completely that she wanted this baby.

But the issues were profound. Robin had what could best be described as a “sick” placenta, the doctor said. In trying to repair itself, the placenta was absorbing all the nutrients instead of passing them to the baby. And it wasn’t going to get better. The baby had stopped growing.

It was June 13, and she was then 27 weeks pregnant.

Two days later, she went for a follow-up ultrasound at Women’s Hospital. “I was expecting bed rest,” Robin recalls. Instead, they told her to check in.

Robin and Rick were in a state of disbelief. In addition to the placenta problem, flow in the umbilical cord was not functioning properly. She would have to be monitored constantly to ensure it didn’t fail altogether. When that happens, there is a five-hour window to deliver the baby alive.

Robin checked into the hospital that night, and immediately began receiving steroid injections to hasten development of the baby’s lungs. She needed more time. Time for the baby’s lungs to develop. Time for him to gain weight. She got six days.

Silas still has nearly transparent skin, but at almost five months, he is up to nearly 7 pounds. He has an adorable button of a dimple in his chin, and an amazingly mellow disposition for a preemie. He looks up at Robin as if there is literally nothing else in the world.

When he was born, she says, he looked like a little old man: skinny and nearly bald, all wrinkled skin. “He had no body fat,” she says.

In the days just before his birth, Rick and Robin got to tour the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. She asked the nurses if there were any babies there under 2 pounds. Robin had no trouble picking out the littlest preemie.

“When Ricky saw that baby, I thought he was going to lose it,” Robin recalls. “He said, 'I didn’t expect that.’”

Everybody expects a Gerber baby, says Dr. J. Laurence Ransom, neonatologist at Women’s Hospital. “To see one so small, and have hope for it to survive is very difficult for some people.”

There are certain milestones that make a big difference in a premature baby’s ability to survive and thrive, Ransom says. Gestational age is first. Weight is second.

“Thirty years ago, kids under 28 weeks rarely survived because they didn’t have the lung maturity,” Ransom says. Today, better ventilators and the use of steroids have dramatically reversed those odds.

Robin didn’t know the odds, but she knew on the day her cord started to fail that her baby was less than 2 pounds, and that wasn’t good.

Robin called Rick and told him to buy a baby book on his way to the hospital. She hadn’t even had time to have a baby shower.

They began dosing her with a drug to protect the baby from cerebral palsy and brain damage. It’s going to burn, they warned. Within the hour, she felt like she was on fire — like her eyeballs were going to pop out. That, she said, was the worst part.

No question about the best part.

“When he came out, he cried,” Robin says, her eyes filling at the memory. “And I was just bawling.”

Silas Richard McCloskey arrived June 21, 2011, at 1 pound, 12 ounces. And he started on the second stage of his journey.

The NICU is a scary place for the uninitiated. Even though they’d had a tour, Rick will never forget the first time they saw Silas there.

“It was overwhelming,” he says. “There’s all these monitors going off, and he’s hooked up to 18 different things, three IVs. He was a week old before I could even touch him.”

Preemies should still be in the warm darkness of their mother’s womb, cushioned from light and sound and external stimulation. So the NICU is dimly lit. The isolettes are heated and sometimes covered with a blanket to shut out light. Preemies can tolerate steady touch, but not stroking.

“I would put my hands through the holes (in his isolette) and touch his arm while I read to him every day,” Robin says.

One of the toughest moments came on June 25, when she had to check out of the hospital — and leave her baby behind.

“I cried the whole way home,” she says.

“Even though I know Silas is getting the best possible care, I ache in the deep part of my heart that only a mother can imagine,” she wrote on Facebook that day. “I feel so lost without him here.”

On June 30, she got to hold him for the first time, and start kangaroo care — laying the baby on your bare chest inside your shirt, skin to skin. Preemies thrive on it.

Nurse practitioner Aly Alcorn recalls that Silas did well for the first couple of weeks, then everything caught up with him.

He had to be put back on the ventilator. He got pneumonia, an E. coli infection, a bowel infection. One of his lungs collapsed. He developed chronic RDS — Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

“It was like a roller coaster ride,” Robin says. “It felt like we’d take three steps forward and two steps back.”

That’s what NICU stays are like, Alcorn says.

“It’s unpredictable. You’re always sitting on the edge of your seat. But she was so steady, so grounded,” she says about Robin.

For a while, Robin cried every night on the drive home from the hospital. Then she pulled herself together, because she had to. She bonded with the other mothers in the NICU, comparing notes and sharing support. She went back to work on a limited basis and finished decorating Silas’ nursery.

By early October, Silas was eating on his own and gaining weight. His one remaining hurdle was being weaned off oxygen. And then came another setback. After weeks of eating mostly on his own, he started refusing the bottle. Like many preemies, he had reflux, which had resulted in oral aversion. If oral aversion takes hold, it can persist for years.

Around that time, Robin got a call from one of the mothers she’d met at the NICU. Five preemies died while Silas was in the NICU. But this one hit Robin particularly hard. She and the mother had grown close over the long months.

Robin went straight to the hospital after the baby’s funeral and found that Silas’ feeding tube had been reinserted. She was devastated. He had been so close to coming home. Now this.

A few days later, Robin was holding Silas when he looked up at her, wide awake, and grinned from ear to ear. Her heart just melted.
Everything was going to be all right.

In late October, Silas was transferred to N.C. Children’s Hospital in Chapel Hill to have a gastrostomy tube inserted. This allows milk to be fed directly into Silas’ stomach if he refuses the bottle. He came home Nov. 8 with the G-tube and oxygen.

He appears to have escaped many of the long-term problems that can affect preemies. He will have to have surgery at 18 months to correct hypospadias, a common condition unrelated to prematurity, in which the opening of the urethra is on the underside of the penis, instead of at the tip.

He is still highly vulnerable to illness, so friends who supported the family during Silas’ hospital stay will have to wait a bit longer to meet him.

The Silas McCloskey Facebook page has 162 members — family, friends, and members of Northside Baptist Church, who rallied around the family, providing food, support and prayer. They raised more than $600 to buy the “frog blankets” (beans wrapped in soft polyester) that preemies love and donate them to the hospital in Silas’ name. They gave Robin a baby shower.

“Sometimes you look around at what’s going on in the world and get discouraged,” she says. “But people have been so loving and giving. It restores your faith in humanity.”

Faith is what kept her going. On one Facebook update, she quoted Isaiah 53:5: by his stripes we are healed.

“Everyday I claim he is healed,” she wrote. “I tell him through his isolette window that he is strong and healed ... I envision him running on the beach next year, playing ball, driving his sisters crazy, and putting his arms around my neck for a hug.”

That vision sustained her.

“She had such strong faith,” says NICU nurse Cathy Wyler. “She always had joy and hope, and that’s what got her through.”

Most parents in the NICU can’t see beyond their own little world, Wyler says.

“But she could see everybody else,” Wyler says. “She would minister to other families. She took care of the other moms in the unit. She even thought about us.”

Robin looks forward to the day she can stop being Silas’ nurse and just be his mom. To hug him without tubes and monitors. But she doesn’t complain.

Everybody quotes Psalm 23, but Robin was struck by Psalms 24: The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.
“We have to fit into God’s plan,” she says, “whether we like it or not.”

Contact Susan Ladd at 373-7006 or susan.ladd@news-record.com