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35 minutes to live, feel love

Jessica and Dave Weatherford knew Zeke's time on Earth would be mere moments. His birth would be filled with warmth and caring.

By Lee Hill Kavanaugh
McClatchy/Tribune newspapers

May 3, 2007

Jessica Weatherford lies helpless on the operating table, staring at a blue surgical sheet hanging inches from her face.

It blocks her view of the Caesarean on the other side, as a doctor reaches for her baby. A baby Weatherford has been waiting for. A baby she prays will live long enough to hold.

Weatherford, 29, feels nothing, hears nothing except her husband, Dave, 35, who is is talking about two years earlier.

Then, Weatherford had gone through an emergency Caesarean, deep anesthesia. It brought forth Victoria "Tori" Ann, now nearly 2.

This time, she is awake, the C-section planned, but there is no question about the outcome. Their boy won't endure beyond the womb. Zeke, they have named him, short for Ezekiel, meaning "God is my strength."

A tiny head appears

The doctor tugs, and between his hands a tiny head appears, covered in wet curls. Weatherford feels her husband's hand gripping hers. He's scared too.

Weatherford remembers her excitement in November when she saw an image of the 20-week fetus and the sonogram technician said it was a boy.

Then the technician grew quiet, and when the Weatherfords saw the doctor, his face wore the news.

I'm sorry, he said. There are abnormalities with your baby's brain and abdomen. Problems too great to fix.

More tests brought more bad news: His heart's veins and arteries were on the wrong sides. A a sack containing half his organs was growing outside his body.

Amniocentesis confirmed a non-hereditary birth defect: full trisomy 13.

Weatherford decided the best gift she could give to her unborn son was to love him until his death, even if the only fullness of his life would be in the soft cushion of her womb.

Many people wouldn't continue a doomed pregnancy. But for the Weatherfords, it was the right choice.

Two weeks after the doctor's visit, a phone rang at the home of Patti Lewis in Kansas City, Mo. On the line, a young woman cried and cried.

"Everybody cries when they call here," said Lewis, 56, who has helped 200 families through her non-profit Alexandra's House, a perinatal hospice.

She opened the house to be a place of caring for families grieving the loss of any infant, be it an unexpected stillborn, a miscarriage, an abortion or an unborn baby the parents know won't survive.

Weatherford and her husband visited Alexandra's House. Lewis shared with them how other families loved their babies at death. Told them all the ways they could love Zeke to remember him forever.

That night Weatherford wrote in her journal that for the first time in weeks, she felt hope. Zeke's due date was five weeks away.

Soon a midwife asked the question Weatherford had been dreading: Had she decided on a vaginal birth or a Caesarean?

"A Caesarean ... would give you more time to enjoy your son," the midwife counseled gently.

Lewis reminded Weatherford that a birth plan would help control who would be in the delivery room and how they wanted Zeke's final moments to be.

Lewis also told her about the arrangements a hospital could make for mothers whose infants die, like moving her into a room on a different floor, away from other mothers and their babies. When leaving the hospital she could go out a different door, so she wouldn't have to see another new mom cuddling her baby.

Weatherford nodded. She marked it all in her notebook.

At 1:30 a.m. March 6, a week before her C-section was scheduled, contractions began. At 4:10 a.m., Weatherford was admitted at Overland Park Regional Medical Center in Kansas. Lewis already was there.

The sound of a thumping heart filled her room, 132 beats a minute: Zeke.

Outside, Weatherford's parents, Lori and Rick Singleton, had arrived. Rick Singleton's eyes were red-rimmed.

Nurses wheel Weatherford into the operating room. Her husband and the entourage wait outside while she got an epidural. Dave gathers everyone to pray.

"Lord, this is your baby. ... We just pray that ... we'll have time with Zeke. ... Amen."

The operating room doors open and a nurse waves everyone in.

Zeke's legs are moving as the doctor pulled him from Weatherford. It is 5:23 a.m.

Zeke doesn't cry. His mouth, with a double cleft lip on either side, slowly opens and closes. He has no nose.

Zeke's bluish skin begins to turn pink. Dave Weatherford places him in his wife's arms.

"Hi," she whispers. "This is Mommy. I love you."

With a finger she strokes his cheek, seeing only a tiny baby, fragile and pure, with a mop of curly hair. A baby who has touched so many lives.

She kisses him.

"Ohhhh," she coos, as if her lips had brushed against the smoothest silk.

Each time she speaks, Zeke moves his head just a little, jostled his tiny hand just a little.

Two, then three, then four more masked faces enter the room. They crowd around the bed: Weatherford's twin sister, Jacquelyn; her father; her mother-in-law, Kathy Weatherford; her minister, Rex Bonar.

Aunts. Grandparents. Friends. They hug each other, reach out to pat her.

"Do you want some skin-to-skin contact, Jess?" her husband asks.

She nods. One tear rolls down her cheek, then another.

Dave Weatherford and a nurse pull sheets down so Zeke is lying on Jessica's sternum. She smiles at feeling his little body.

But too soon, she realizes Zeke is leaving.

His cheek turns sallow, then a shade of blue.

'No, no, no,' she cries

"No, no, no," Weatherford cries. Softly at first, and then with a deep, sobbing grief, wails of pain. And every person moving or whispering or writing stops.

Dave Weatherford breaks down in his mother's arms.

To confirm what Jessica already knows, a doctor listens for life.

"He's done," the doctor says. The digital clock read 5:58.

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