On the evening of Thursday, October 22nd I had the wonderful oppurtunity to share the evening with some wonderful people who love our babies and the March of Dimes. The evening was kicked off with some great food provided by some of greatest chefs from Northwest Arkansas. It was followed by a silent auction that included items donated from local business and individuals. My favoriate was the autographed football signed by Arkansas head football coach Bobby Petrino. To bad I did not have the funds to bid on this. Once the silent auction was over they moved onto the live auction and honored the Booth familiy. After all was said and done this event was a success!

I arrived that afternoon to help set-up. During this time a had the chance to meet and work with some wonderful volunteers. The place the event was held in reminded me of an office building built during the 60's. It was hip and retro. I also created the Arkansas Preemie stories that were used during the silent auction.

I would like to thank Miss Arkansas International, Tressa Horton, Miss Teen Arkansas International, Kristyn Baker, and her mother for joining me this evening. We passed out program books and greeted the guest.

The weather and the company were so nice at the American Heart Association Golf Tournament. It was held at Chanel Country Club in Little Rock, AR. I was pleased to share this event with, Amberlee Haymen, Mrs. Arkansas International Robin Moore, Dana Wetzel, and Miss International Erin Golden.

The day started off nice and dry at Toad Suck Park in Conway, AR. I had a great time neeting so many people who were there to help the March of Dimes.Over 300 bikers from all of Arkansas rode for our babies. The biker who raised the most lead the pack and the chapter that raised the largest amount followed behind the leader.

After the bikers left the park they took the senic route to the Clinton Library in Little Rock, AR. After helping clean up the park I drove to meet the bikers at the library. I was so thrilled to arrive and see such a fantastic set-up. It amazes me that I did not take a picture of it. My parents were so kind to bring Alex to this event. About the time they arrived the rain came with them. Alex and I waited under the Mission Family tent and waited for the bikers to arrive. While we were waiting we met some wonderful famlies who also had a baby born to soon. Small world...one of famlies have a little girl named Alex and she shares the same birthday, different year, as my Alex. Then to top it off she was born premature  and her mother and I have simular names.

After about and hour I decided that the rain was never going to end. So we went back to my parents house. As you can tell Alex was worn out. Sometimes it is hard being popular. I am so thankful for all of the bikers that rode for our babies. One interesting fact...the Arkansas Bikers for Babies event is the third largest Bikers for Baies in the nation! Way to go Arkansas bikers!!!

I had such a wonderful time judging the Pope County Fair Queen Pageant. That evening Mrs. Arkansas International 2009-Robin Moore and Arkansas International Director-Bernee Thurow also joined me in judging. Congratulations to Katie Balentine for winning the title of Miss Pope County! She will compete for the title of Miss Arkansas Fair Queen in October, 2009.

Thank you to Barbera Jean Limited for hosting Charity Week. Each day they showcased fashions and a percentage of the proceeds for that day would benefit a charity that has been preselected. On this particular day the American Heart Association was the featured charity.

I had the oppurtunity to model with Amberlee Haymon and Miss Arkansas Tressa Horton.

It is 1:25AM on Monday, August 24TH, 2009. I know you are probably wondering what in the world I am doing up this late? I know that I should be in bed peacefully sleeping or counting sheep. But I have too much on my mind. The truth is I have self diagnosed myself with a mild case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Okay, now I am sure you are wondering what that is. According to medicianenet.com it is an emotional illness that develops as a result of a terribly frightening, life-threatening, or otherwise highly unsafe experience. PTSD sufferers re-experience the traumatic event or events in some way, tend to avoid places, people, or other things that remind them of the event (avoidance), and are exquisitely sensitive to normal life experiences (hyperarousal). So the part that states “exquisitely sensitive to normal life experience experiences (hyperarousal)” that is my issue.  The next question that I am sure you may be wondering is “why do I think that I have PTSD”? Since last year on this date or near it I get really emotional and if I do not keep myself busy it is worse. This day should be a very happy occasion after all it is the day my son Alex was born. Therefore it should be a very happy birthday. At the same time that PTSD pops its ugly head.

I t was two years ago today at 8:09PM that my life changed forever. I was in my 24 week of my first pregnancy. My husband just figured out what the baby’s name was going to be, I just registered for all of the cool baby items that I know we will need, and the crib is in the living room waiting to be moved into the soon to be nursery.  Of course I knew that I had 15 more weeks to get everything ready. We still had to move all the guest bedroom stuff into the other room so that I could use the front bedroom with a bay window in it for the nursery. I also had plans to paint a froggy mural on one of walls. But my body had other plans. The Wednesday of that week I noticed some heavy bleeding. I did not think much about since most pregnant women have the same issue. Thursday went and now it is Friday. On this day I just started my 25 week and the bleeding would not go away. I finally called the Doctor. The nurse on the phone told me to stay off of my feet. I should have told her that I was at work and it required me to be on my feet. But I did try to stay off of them. As the day went on things did not get better. By that point I was starting to feel that something was not right. So I contacted the hospital and the nurse told me to come into Labor and Delivery for an exam. Now the tears start flowing. All of sudden I was scared to death. I called my husband, who was at home; I told him was going on. He was at home 45 minutes away mowing the lawn. So it would take him a while to get to the hospital. Mean while it was about 5:30PM and I was at work. I quickly got with my boss and told him what was going on. I think I gave him a heart attack. He quickly walks me to my car and offered to take me but I was to hard headed. I drove myself the ten minute drive. I kept telling myself to stop crying because I needed to focus on getting us to the hospital safely.

As soon as made it to St. Edward Mercy Medical Center I quickly went to the third floor aka Labor and Delivery. Once I was at the Front Desk I started crying again this time it was awful. The poor Nurse tried to get my information but I kept on crying. Then she takes me to the exam room. Here is were my pregnancy gets a new flight plan. She tells me “that she thinks I am fully dilated and my water sack is bulging”. She does a quick ultrasound to check on the baby. Everything looks good but he is in the breech position. Next she leaves the room to get the Doctor on call. Of course they were unable to get a hold of my Doctor. By this time Dr. McClannahan walks in to verify what the Nurse told me. Just as he starts to tell me the news my husband walks in. We are then told that we would be having a baby tonight. The baby was small enough that I could have a normal delivery but the doctor did not want to risk the chance of the cord chocking him. So the only option was an emergency C-Section. The Doctor put the bed at an angle and then left the room so that we could call our family. I will never forget when he opened the door to the room I saw so many people in the hallway moving very quickly. I would later find out that I was a Stat meaning “immediately”.  During all of this I kept telling everyone to “please save my baby”.

After what seemed liked a few minutes I was rolled into the C-Section room and prepped for surgery. I met a lady named Emily who was my Anesthesiologist and finally found out what my Nurses name was….Liz. As I am lying on my back I noticed once again that there are a lot of people in the room. I would later find out that those people would be in my life forever. Before they started I asked everyone “to please save my baby”. The Doctor tells me “that my baby needs to weigh at least a pound and a half to have a chance” that is 1 pound 8 ounces. After the medicine kicked in they stated the procedure. I will never forget the pulling and how at one point I felt like I was losing my breath. At 8:09PM Alexander James Stengel was born weighing 1 pound 9 ounces and was 12 ½ inches long. All I wanted to hear was him crying. Then all of a sudden I heard a very faint cry. Then the Neonatologist and his medical team began working on Alex. As they are working on me they roll him past me on a warming table. For a brief moment they stop right by my head so I could see him. At that moment his tiny little arm fell out towards me. It was like he was letting me know that everything is going to be okay. I knew at that moment that I just gave birth to a miracle and that he was going to be okay. Some people may say it was the drugs making me think that but I knew as his mother that he was a fighter. I also knew that God was in control and that Angels were taking very good care of him.

At this point Alex is now in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit and I am in my room. When something like this happens you have no clue what to do or how to feel. I was in so much pain from the surgery and not to mention my body was all out of whack. Moments later a Nurse came and got me and helped me into a wheelchair so that I could go and see Alex. I will be forever grateful for our Cousins Carl and Jana Stengel for what they did next. They thought for us when we couldn’t and made sure Alex was baptized. They got with the hospital to find a Priest. While my husband and I were in the NICU Alex was baptized. He was then prepped and taken away on the Angel One helicopter from Arkansas Children’s Hospital. But before he left the Angel One Flight Team stopped by my room so that we could see him. There we received our instructions on what to do while he is at ACH. 

That Monday would be the first time that I would get to see Alex and when I did I cried. I never thought I would have to see my baby fight for his life. Laying on a warming table was my son with wires every where, a ventilator tube coming out of his mouth, a halo over his head, plastic covering him, and a bright billirubin light pointing down on him. Alex would spend 108 days in the hospital. Eight of those weeks were at ACH and seven more weeks at St. Edward Mercy Medical Center. On December 10Th, 2007 just three days after his due date we were able to bring Alex home. On the twenty fourth day of his life I finally had the opportunity to hold him for the first time. If he would have been full-term I would have had that chance but I had to wait twenty four days.

Today, Alex and I will be taking cupcakes to the NICU at St. Edward. I figured they were part of the team that gave him the chance to have birthdays so we should all celebrate together. I will be forever grateful for everything that was done to take care of Alex, me, and my husband. So many people were part of the team that saved Alex’s life. If it was not for them….. well I do not want to think of that. Thank you to everyone for what they did and for what they gave to us. Most of all….. Happy 2nd Birthday to my tiny miracle!!!

 

When a baby is born too soon, it's hard to imagine that the infant would do better anywhere else in the world than in America. The most fragile preterm infants are housed in specialized intensive-care units and cared for by world-class experts. Prematurity cost the country some $26 billion in 2005, according to the U.S. Institute of Medicine. And yet for all the technology and expense, roughly 30,000 American babies under age 1 die each year. They die at a rate three times as high as in Singapore, which has the world's best infant survival — long considered a key indicator of a nation's overall level of health. In fact, the U.S. — ranked No. 30 in 2005 — lags behind almost every other industrialized nation, behind Cuba, Hungary and Poland.

What explains such dismal figures? The math is fairly simple. Babies born preterm — before 37 weeks of gestation — account for two-thirds of all infant deaths, and the number of preemies in the U.S. is growing. Today 1 in 8 American births is preterm — a nearly 20% rise since 1990. The babies at highest risk are those born "very preterm" — before 32 weeks of gestation — who account for just 2% of all births but more than half of all infant deaths (by comparison, 99% of late-preterm babies, born just a week or two early, survive). These very preterm births have driven up the U.S. infant-mortality rate to 6.86 deaths per 1,000 live births. "If we really want to make progress in infant mortality, we have to figure out how to address the problem of preterm birth," says Eve Lackritz, chief of maternal and infant health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

But if the reason for the infant-mortality crisis seems clear, what to do about it is not, because premature births remain a genuine medical mystery: in nearly half the cases, the cause is unknown. It is well established that preterm births are more common among very young and very old mothers and among women carrying multiples — twins or triplets. But rates have climbed considerably even among singleton births. Preterm births are also more common in women with upper-genital-tract infections like bacterial vaginosis, in very underweight and very overweight women, in women who undergo cesarean-section births and in women with certain bleeding and clotting disorders. But taken together, these factors still leave doctors stumped in more than 40% of preterm cases.

The enduring dilemma of infant mortality is prompting experts to revisit one of biology's longest-standing questions: Why are babies born when they are? Research teams across the country, including obstetricians, statisticians and molecular biologists, are working in concert — and very slowly beginning to piece together the answer.

A Social Laboratory
At Emory University in Atlanta, Dr. Alfred Brann directs a World Health Organization Collaborating Center in Reproductive Health. The center is a joint project of Emory and the CDC, and in its 28 years of operation, the staff has worked on five continents, in countries including Afghanistan, Cuba, Mexico and Russia, on projects ranging from improving patient safety during childbirth to researching the causes of low fertility.

Brann has a more personal perspective on maternal and infant health than other researchers might. "My mother died in my birth in 1934, and my aunt, who raised me, had two very tiny premature babies who died," he says. Brann trained as a pediatric neurologist, but about 10 years ago, the doctor began to wonder how he might reduce the preterm-birth rate in Georgia — noting that a very small number of early-preterm infants made up the bulk of that state's infant deaths. He focused on one key fact. To date, the most reliable predictor of preterm birth is simply the mother's having given birth preterm before.

Brann settled on a strategy: focus on the health of mothers instead of that of the babies — and most important, get them before they're pregnant. It was a turnaround in a field that had previously "jumped over the problem of why are women having very low-birth-weight babies and started on saving the babies," says Brann. Infant mortality dropped sharply in the U.S. throughout the 20th century, with improvements first in infectious-disease control and later in survival of vulnerable infants. But even as neonatal care improved, scientists were still uncertain why some babies were born so fragile to begin with. Brann felt the single-minded focus on infant health was keeping the problems in women's health hidden in plain view.

In six months during 2003 and '04, Brann and his colleagues ran a small pilot project. They enrolled 29 women in greater Atlanta who had recently given birth to a very low-birth-weight baby and gave each mother two years of free primary health care. Women received regular checkups, nutritional screenings and chronic-disease management when appropriate. Women who said they did not want to get pregnant again got free contraception. Participants also had access to what Brann calls a "resource mother," who helped each woman with day-to-day life improvements, like securing an apartment or enrolling in school.

The trial results were impressive. Compared with a similar group of women who had preterm, very low-birth-weight babies two years earlier, the intervention group had roughly one-quarter as many repeat adverse outcomes — like ectopic pregnancies, underweight babies or stillbirths. The decrease was achieved mostly by reducing unwanted pregnancies overall. "Now a woman who is healthy and has some control over her own life and elects to become pregnant will have a healthier outcome. That's not rocket science," Brann says.
   With Brann's guidance, a larger version of the Atlanta trial is recruiting volunteers in Mississippi — which has the highest infant-mortality rate in the U.S. Two other studies have been proposed, one in another Georgia health district and one in Alabama. Of course, plenty of women appear to be perfectly healthy and still give birth preterm. But the idea that an infant's and a mother's health are related in some complex way — that factors not just during pregnancy but also before conception can have an impact — may help explain why preterm birth has remained a mystery for so long. Many of the things that researchers associated with preterm birth in the field have not seemed to matter when tested rigorously in randomized controlled trials. "[Of] all these things we take for granted — prenatal care, nutrition," says the CDC's Lackritz, almost none have proved effective by themselves in preventing preterm delivery. Only one intervention — weekly shots of a synthetic progesterone — has been shown to reduce preterm birth in high-risk pregnancies. But no other measure, such as bed rest or home uterine monitoring, has proved consistently effective.

It is possible that the reason doctors cannot pinpoint a single cause of preterm birth is that there are simply too many, involving a vast range of genetic, medical and social factors. "It's almost like cancer," Lackritz says. "There are so many different kinds of cancer, and that's probably going to be our [research] model too."

Search and Rescue
Like cancer researchers, the network of scientists who study prematurity has cast a wide net. "We know what's associated with preterm birth, and we know some of the pathophysiology," says Alan Fleischman, medical director of the March of Dimes, the nonprofit foundation best known for its role in ridding the U.S. of paralytic polio in the 20th century and now at the forefront of the charge against prematurity. "But we still have a long way to go in truly understanding what initiates labor or initiates the rupture of membranes that results in preterm birth."

In 2005 the March of Dimes began issuing grants as part of a new Prematurity Research Initiative, dedicated to rooting out the underlying causes of preterm labor. Last year the initiative had $11.5 million pledged to active studies. Some researchers are hunting for microorganisms that live in the womb to determine their possible role in preterm labor. Others are looking at uterine-muscle function, disruptions in circadian rhythm and weight gain during pregnancy. But perhaps most intriguing of all is the search for genes in mother and child that may affect inflammation — the body's first-line immune response to injury and infection.

Researchers think it's possible that the mother's inflammatory response could be revved up — by disease (bacterial vaginosis, for instance), physical stress (working long hours in a physically demanding job like waitressing) or even social stress. Researchers have long wondered why unmarried women and those with low education have higher preterm-birth rates than their married, college-educated counterparts; social stress could play a role.

Perhaps more troubling is the pronounced racial disparity in infant mortality. African-American babies die more than twice as often as non-Hispanic white babies. (But taken alone, even white Americans would rank just 26th in infant survival globally, behind most of the world's high-income populations; black Americans would fall about 10 places lower.) This divergence is driven largely by blacks' higher rates of preterm birth. Since the death-rate gap persists even among highly educated and high-income Americans — well-educated blacks have higher preterm-birth rates than poorly educated whites — some researchers think there could be greater stress among blacks at all social strata or a genetic predisposition to certain inflammatory responses among some African Americans.

That's because inflammation, researchers believe, may trigger early labor. Labor itself appears to be an inflammatory process. In biopsies of women undergoing cesarean sections, Scottish researchers found large numbers of pro-inflammatory white blood cells in the cervixes of women who had begun labor. Other studies found these cells in fetal membranes during labor, as well as gene expression in the mother consistent with localized inflammation. If such a far-reaching mechanism is to blame, it might explain why discrete treatments, like treating a single infection, don't always help.

The answer is by no means clear. Progress on prematurity, Lackritz says, will probably spring from innovations that combine social, clinical and genetic research. But she is optimistic. "We've seen it over and over," she says. When the nation's resources and will are behind a common goal, "then we have impact," she says — and thousands of babies' lives could be saved in the process.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1912201_1912244,00.html

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