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Web posted Sunday, 10 February 2002
At exactly 1:06am on Tuesday, 5 February 2002, Andrea Ruth Rabinowitz entered the world. The event came in the course of an emergency C-section performed at Vanderbilt Hospital.
Andrea
is doing well despite being born two months prematurely, and
everyone is prayerful that she will continue to do well.
Currently she is under observation at the intensive care unit
within Vanderbilt University Medical Center. It is anticipated
she will continue to be observed there for at least the next 3-4
weeks, at which time she may be transferred to a closer hospital,
or perhaps be allowed to go home directly.
Melinda is also recovering as comfortably as can be expected from all that has come to pass.
The birth was a culmination of a week of rapidly-unfolding events. In the course of a routine pre-natal visit, despite weeks of prior visits and normal test results, Melinda was diagnosed as having toxemia, which is a form of pregnancy-induced blood pressure. Currently, medical experts do not know what causes this condition, or why it occurs rapidly, only that giving birth is the only available cure. Thus, doctors at Maury Regional Hospital--and later, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center--were tasked with delaying the birth for as long as possible without endangering mother and child.
For a time, conditions stabilized, and
Melinda was briefly discharged from the hospital with
instructions to stay in bed for the duration of the pregnancy.
But on Sunday the 3rd, after only two days at home, she was asked
to return. Even so, conditions did not seriously deteriorate
until Monday, when that afternoon her blood pressure went
dangerously high. It was then she was transferred to Vanderbilt,
and only hours later when the decision was made to proceed with
the emergency cesearian.
Andrea breathed on her own the moment she was born--it had been feared her lungs might not have sufficiently developed by this point--and her crying could be heard throughout the operating room. At one point, nurses gathered to look at and hold the new arrival, and even the father was able to hold her for a few moments before she was taken to the ICU, where she has been since.
Andrea Ruth Rabinowitz is the first daughter of the immediate family, and is also the first grandchild of Sander's parents, Ruth and the late Bernard M. Rabinowitz. She is also the first granddaughter of Antonio and Helen Samson. -SJR-
Wayne Nurmela provided photography for this report.