Episode 46 SN: A Prayer Answered: Rachel’s story

P: welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for coming. Why don’t you tell us your name and where you’re from?

Rachel: My name is Rachel Neve Midbar, I believe living in a Druze village in Israel Cosmosphere right outside of Haifa. And they’ve been living in Israel. off and on since 1983. And originally from Westport, Connecticut. 

P: Uh, wow. Wow. That’s very cool. And I know from the writing that you sent me that you have six kids.

R: Yes, six six children. Six pregnancies six birth six living children. Lucky Yeah.

P: So so lucky. I was gonna say otherwise known in the wider world as a lucky duck. And from the piece that I read, it looked like your first pregnancy was pretty young. You were pretty.

R: I got married, we were 21. When we got married, we met when we were 19. And my first daughter was born. I was 22 years old.

P: So let’s just let’s talk for one second about that. So walking into this pregnancy What did you imagine pregnancy would be like?

R: Really, I think that I played with dolls till I was about 14 years old. And then I could not wait to have my first child. I was raised in a pretty abusive home and caring for the dolls nurturing them was my way of nurturing myself. And I missed it very much in those in between years, when there wasn’t dolls and there wasn’t babies, but I naturally assumed that I was the Born earth mother that I would squat and a child would arise like that it would be so easy. And I was shocked that my body didn’t didn’t have it easy. All of my births except for one were emergencies. 

P: Wow

R: They were either in operating rooms about to get into the operating room. The epidural already in or already after, like hours and hours of transition labor, going to going to C section. So I had three vaginal births and three C sections. But only one was what I would might term and easy birth. It wasn’t that the doctor was very in control was just him and me in the room and he was very in control like you know, sort of yelling at me. Breathe, stop. Open stop you want if you don’t behave you’re gonna get a tear. You know, like

P: that sounds like an oddly aggressive coach, but it sounds like it worked. 

R: I mean, I wonder if I’d had doulas if I’d had a different husband. I’d have different doctors. If I had been allowed to walk around if I if the third pregnancy that I’m going to tell you about birth my daughter was born via cesarean section if that had happened, how am I I had very big babies, but even given very big babies I wonder if I have been allowed to birth a little bit more naturally. If it would have been a little different but you never know.

P: We’re all the births in Israel. 

R: All the births were in Israel. 

P: Okay. I’m guessing the six kids it was easy to get pregnant.

R: I got pregnant pretty much when I wanted to.

P: Okay, so easy to get pregnant. And and I guess we’ll focus on the third pregnancy here. But generally speaking, where your pregnancy is relatively straightforward,

R: I guess I can answer yes, except for the third pregnancy, more or less straightforward. Some small issues here and there. Maybe more than others, but pretty much straightforward. The third pregnancy was really the third pregnancy was the pregnancy. I didn’t want to get pregnant. I got pregnant using birth control. But I want to tell you the whole story.

P: Okay. Yeah. So walk us through that then.

R: Okay. So I was 24 years old. I had two children, a year and a half apart two daughters after the second one was born, because we were American immigrants. And in in the early 90s, there was an enormous infiltration of Russian immigrants from the Soviet Union Soviet Union collapsed. All the refusnicks, the. Russian Jews who weren’t allowed to leave left and Israel absorbed a million and a half people.

P: wow

R:  The Army hasn’t been as needy of guys like my ex husband, who were college educated American immigrants in their 20s were married with kids.

So it was known that if you had two kids, before you turn to the Israeli Government and said I’m here, then you would go in and just do four months of army service rather than serving for long periods of time. And because my ex husband had a bachelor’s degree, he was taken to be a medic, he was being trained to be a medic, and I was at home with these two small babies. Just you know, one was not you know, barely two and the other one was just you know, a little small infant and I was really actually having the time of my life. I had the car to myself everything. The only problem was that after that second delivery, it seems like perhaps a piece of skin something stayed behind. I think that the placenta didn’t come out, whole. I don’t really recall. But anyway, something was there. That every time I had my period, the periods were getting longer and longer and closer and closer together. The thing that your listeners should know is that as Orthodox Jews vaginal bleeding meant that my ex husband and I couldn’t touch each other. So he would come home, let’s say every two weeks from the army, and we were really young. And not being able to have sex was huge. It was just it was just huge. And I just seem to be what’s called in NIDA, this, you know, state of menstruating every single time that he was coming home. It was it was actually the doctor who was who was yelling at me and my second birth I went to him and he said, You need a DNC. And before he, he came to that conclusion, he put me on hormones, and he gave me a diaphragm. Rather than just putting me on the pill. I don’t know why he didn’t put me on the pill. But this was just medical. This was a this whole pregnancy was just medical malpractice from the beginning until the end. So he put me on hormones to see if he could regulate the bleeding with hormones if my hormones had gotten knocked out, because the pregnancy and then he gives me this diaphragm. But meanwhile, we didn’t have any sex. And finally after a few months of this, he said, Okay, you need to do

DNC in Israel. What they do is they put women in the hospital the night before they do them. First thing in the morning 6:30am The five women that are on the ward to go get a DNC and I know this because I later lived during their pregnancy for six months on this board. 

P: Wow. 

R: So the women would wake up in the morning, go boom, boom, boom, but I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have a mom or a babysitter or somebody to come in and watch these two little babies. And I think I have one of the daughters had an ear infection. So my husband got an evening out of the army. We went to the doctor’s office, his secretary held my hand. It was late at night. And he did a DNC in his office. And he gave me some 

P: Wow.

R:  Yeah. And it gave me some he was he was he was a real character. Because he was known in Jerusalem he was he was known. So he, he gives me a broad spectrum antibiotic, but even by the next morning, and I only realized that later when I was living on the ward and saw women just pop out of bed. After taking a little nap after their DNC and just getting up and running. I realized I was sick. We’re already the next morning and I was sick the next morning. So say that this happened on a Tuesday. We were supposed to leave that weekend to fly back to the States to be at my ex husband’s brother’s wedding. And I think it was like Thursday night, maybe two or three days later, we went into the hospital. That doctor the known doctor was not there. And so another doctor saw me and He gave did a swab and said I’m going to send this to the lab but you definitely have a uterine infection. Here’s change your antibiotic to this. So we had to cancel and he said there’s no way you’re flying. So we had to cancel the trip to America. And my ex husband then called the Israeli army who said to him, Look, if you’re getting off, if it’s a trip to America to your brother’s wedding, you have a week off. If it’s like stay home and take care of your sick wife, get her mother to do it. And you’re you have to come back to the army and that was that there was like no question. 

So I called my doctor to see if he could have influence because Israel is a really small place and everybody knows somebody who can make a call and get something done. And he said over the phone you don’t have a uterine infection. This is the bossy doctor. And so he says come in. So we go into the hospital and the two doctors end up standing there in the hallway of the hospital screaming at each other. And I’m standing there, you know, here I am this. You know, very young, very young and naive woman with two small children husband in the army. And these doctors are screaming at each other and I have no idea. Take the first antibiotic, the second antibiotic. So I went home and we found through asking some people for a private doctor who did his own lab work in his apartment, who worked out of Jerusalem, a very elderly American guy who got gone to Harvard Medical School like in the 40s. And he saw me through this uterine infection took about six weeks of changing antibiotic several times. 

And I was in bed the entire time with this husband in the army. It was it was a very, it was very difficult. And at the end, he said to me, he said, Rahel, you’re cured, you’re better, but don’t have sex yet. And here we were, you know, again, whether, you know, right, the young 20s wanting to just sleep with each other. We got home and we were kind of very frustrated because we I felt better and I was better and it was we just wanted to be together. And so we call the doctor back and he said, Alright, look you can have sex, but just be superduper gentle, like, No, you know, no acrobatics, I was like super gentle sex and we were like fine. I put in this diaphragm that the doctor had given me and we and we are together and the next morning I get up and go to the bathroom, and the diaphragm just falls out into the toilet. And it’s like, oh great

P: that’s a bad sign.

R: It’s just what I need. So I call up the private doctor. And he said come in and I’ll give you a shot a morning after shot. So we run right away to his house. He she gives me a shot. I spent the whole night throwing from my greatest work. And then you know, my husband had finished the army by then we were supposed to go to visit the family that we didn’t make it to the wedding so we get on the flight we go to America, and when I’m in America I missed my period. And I take a home pregnancy test and I realize that I have gotten pregnant 

Then what happens is the story that I wrote about in the essay that where in my pregnancy was not there was not okay. I didn’t it didn’t wasn’t sitting right. There was like something how it wasn’t like sitting in the right place, and I could feel this tugging. And I was exhausted, which is not surprising to have three kids in three years and my mother in law was getting more and more and more frustrated with me because she was trying to clean for Passover which is like this big. Turning the house over and all the leavened bread, and I was kind of in the way with me and my children. The kids were sleeping in we were all three, all four of us sleeping in a little room in the attic, the attic stairs. Were very steep I was carrying these two little ones up and down his attic stairs. My ex husband had just gotten his first job and he had to fly to Chicago because it was with options trading firm that had an office in in Jerusalem, but their main office was in Chicago. And he said to me, can you just go down to the end of the block and pick up my dry cleaning? And so I put the kids in the stroller and I went walk down to the end of the block and I’m coming back carrying this suit. It’s not and I felt total you know, like a tear. I get the kids inside I run upstairs. There’s just blood everywhere just just a huge hemorrhage. I clean up as best I can I go downstairs and I tell my mother in law 

P: Okay. Wait, let’s go a little slower here. This is This is terrifying, right? I must be very painful when you feel a tear.

 

R: It was it was very painful. It was very scary. But my ex husband was he was not okay. He was he was undiagnosed manic depressive with schizoid affect. I mean he was just and life with him was very tough. And by this time we’ve been married for for four years at this point. And I and I grew up in this house where you really had to take care of yourself. when my mother I told my mother in law I was pregnant. She said what do you need this for? I was like, Well, you know what? 

P: is She not orthodox? 

R: Yes. Yeah, 

P: so isn’t she on the on the baby team.

R: My oldest daughter just went to visit them. They’re in their 90s they’re living in Jerusalem now. And they live right here. Their youngest daughter had has eight kids and each other her kids is having kids and all the other kids that have settled in June, summer all around her. And my daughter said that she sat there in their house for a couple of hours visiting them and just grandchildren great grandchildren were running in and out. Getting a lollipop getting a kiss getting you know, trying to run to the store for your grandma, you know, like so, you know. She is on the baby thing. I think that she I think that she justifiably thought that my ex husband and I had enough on our plate. 

P: Okay, 

R: that life was hard. Enough. I just got through this illness. And I don’t think she liked either of us very much. I you know, if you don’t say that, what do you need to score? I mean, like unless you really don’t like somebody. Now that I’m divorced, I don’t speak to them anymore. I mean, if that speaks to the kind of relationship we had and my ex husband has completely, he lives with a 60 year old man living with his parents. So

P: it seems like a strange thing to say no matter what, especially in an orthodox household where there’s so much celebration

R: it was it. It was a terrible thing to say the other terrible thing was that when I came to her and said I’ve just had a hemorrhage. I need to go to the hospital. She said, Well, your your your father in law won’t be home until nine o’clock. And I have this little I had I had a 12 year old sister in law that was in the house. And man my two kids. Well, you know, we’re in Queens, New York, what’s called a baby center, right? It’s not like that doesn’t you know, it’s not like you can’t call

P: you are out on a farm. Yeah,

R: right. You know, it’s a medical emergency. What is this like wait for three hours to go to the hospital like

P: I read that and I thought I must be misunderstanding what she’s saying here because hemorrhage does not equal hang out. Right?

R: No, but for her and what was I going to do? Yeah. And also it wasn’t like she said, Go lay down. I’ll go over with your kids. I had to feed them and get them bathed and into bed and then my father in law, mosied in then at 9pm. And we got the car. And she tells me, she worked at NYU Medical Center. And so she said to me, I’m not going to take you to the hospital here in Queens. We’re going to go into Manhattan to the better hospital and I was like, Listen, lady, wherever. Get there, and I was scared to death because my ex husband was very he was very, very, very hard on me. And I knew that if I lost a pregnancy it would have just been a really bad thing in our marriage. Okay, like I would have probably possibly lost the marriage. I’m I think if I hadn’t had that pregnancy hadn’t lasted the way it did. I don’t think we would have stayed together at that point, I think, because I didn’t want to get pregnant. I wanted I needed that break. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to do a lot of things. And that was already starting to occur to me so I think that I was pushed, you know, getting ready to push on. 

So we get to the hospital and NYU Medical Center is like I felt like I had been dropped into the jungles of Nicaragua. The place was packed. Everyone was screaming the bed that they put me on was broken. The floor was covered with blood that there was a female doctor came over to examine me the examination was very perfunctory, very harsh. It was painful. And she said to me, your cervix is closed and I said okay, what does that mean? And she said, well, either you’ve expelled the pregnancy. And if your cervix just closed right back up again, or you haven’t the babies died, but you haven’t expelled it yet. I’ll come out sometime tonight. Or you’re still pregnant and I so I knew that my cervix didn’t just close up again. I just had two babies. 

P: Yeah, 

R: that that wasn’t that wasn’t wasn’t you know, just asking me Did you see anything in the toilet or anything and I hadn’t,

P: how far along are you at this point? 

R: 10 weeks. 10 weeks pregnant? And I had all my children in Israel.  I lived on that ward for six months. I watched women come in with excessive vomiting and get a bed overnight, an infusion and an ultrasound. There. Why didn’t I have an ultrasound? Why didn’t somebody give me a blood test? So easy to see if you’re still pregnant or not. They sent me home and we made i They made an appointment for me in Manhattan to get a private ultrasound. The next day was St. Patrick’s Day. Travel with by with a car service because my mother in law was like That’s it. She’s trying to go in the car service the next day to get back into Manhattan. Drink like a half a gallon of water. Get in front of the ultrasound and then I think I and then the office closed and I had to sit on the on the sidewalk in Manhattan and watch the revelers go by for like two hours until my mother in law got into Manhattan to pick me up. Because I was told that I was supposed to be in bed. I supposed to be in bed rest. So I come home the baby’s alive. There’s a placental tear. The ultrasound was like some special machine they blew her up really big and she was like dancing. It was it was this thing that she has done the My daughter is 33 years old today. She has cerebral palsy. And throughout her life she does that. She says something or or does something or succeeds at something in a way that’s so surprising and full of energy in life. She just always like brings me back around. But that was like the first time that she did that. You know, she’s just this exquisite, full color, baby, just vertical and dancing around. It was incredible to see

 and there was a tear on the placenta so they told me to stay in bed for two days. And then I could get up and walk around, which was also bad advice. My in laws got got together I went home I got into bed. My ex husband came home from Chicago and they took my loss took him aside and said look, the big holidays coming and your grandparents are coming and your brother and his wife and all their kids are coming. We don’t really have room for you guys. You guys are this is just too much trouble. So here’s $1,000 and go back to Israel and have your Passover there. 

P: Wow. 

R: I have to say I don’t think that I had a civil word with my mother in law ever again. After that. There was you know, no matter what happened between us. This was like this. The anger that I still carry today that you would do that to any human being 

P: right. 

R: Tell this tell the other brother to stay home. Tell them you know, double up everybody’s beds. Yeah, but make room for the woman who just had a hemorrhage. So within three days, let’s say three or four days of this happening. I’m on a plane. And the only plane you can get to get into is from from America, Israel before Passover is a very difficult thing. Everybody’s going to Israel for Passover. So we got a flight to Orly and then we got a flight out of de gaulle. And it was Sunday so we had to take two babies, two big suitcases and get out of the plane out of the airport into a taxi into another airport and onto another plane.

P: Rahel, this does not sound like bedrest.

R:  No no, no, exactly.  So, we we got home we spent one night in our house and then we went to a hotel and we stayed in a hotel for the week of Passover when that was over. We went back to our apartment. And that weekend I started to feel contractions and I said to my to my ex husband I said you know I think by then I’m like, in in week 1314. I said I’m really I think I’m feeling contractions. He said no, you’re like in the beginning of her pregnancy. I said no, no, my son is getting hard. It’s hard. It’s tensing up. It’s getting round. This is a contraction. So we go back to the private doctor, right the one who helped me through and he said you’re absolutely having contractions, your cervix is dilated. He did not have a good enough ultrasound machine to see exactly what was going on. Nobody did here in Israel. Nobody did. Nobody had that technology to be able to see exactly what was going on and nobody really loved and he gave me some medicines take it home but he told me you need to be off your feet. You cannot pick up your kids. You can’t do anything. Well, that lasted like Not at all. My mother came but by the time my mother came within two days of my mother getting there I had to keep he put me in the hospital. He put me in the hospital. I was in my 14th week of pregnancy and I stayed there until the beginning of my ninth month

P: and he put you in there so that he could so he could ensure that your bed resting.

R: I couldn’t I couldn’t not be out of bed. As soon as I got into the hospital. I went under the auspices, not of the private doctor who had the ability to work in that hospital. But the person who was the head of the hospital was the mean doctor who had given me the other wrong size diaphragm. So I right. I was his patients in the hospital. Okay, the other doctor could come visit me to look at my records. And stuff. And what when I had the intersection that the the very smart older doctor had gone and looked at my file and said that the swab that had been taken that night had been lifted out of my file. So we knew that the the meanish doctor was up to up to up to tricks. So the older doctor was going to keep an eye on me he had he had the ability to work in the hospital, but he didn’t want to take over from this other guy because it would have also been bad for me so they kept me in the hospital. I was in a bed where my head was near the floor. My feet were in the air. There’s a word there’s a name for it. And I was allowed out of bed to go to the bathroom. To take a shower a quick shower every couple of days. And once a week to go down to the end of the hall to talk to my little girls on on the phone. Remember, I have two babies at home

P: What let’s talk about this for a second. The tilted upside down does not sound comfortable and to some degree a tear in part of the placenta. it makes sense to some degree to say don’t move and maybe that will heal but do they give you any extended description of why bed rest is going to help you with this

R: All they knew was I was having contractions and they played with my medication. So there was a suppository that they would give me at night that made me sleepy. There was sometimes the pills that the the older doctor had given me those pills that they gave me to take, but most of the time I hadn’t. I had almost all the time I had infusions that was giving me this muscle relaxing medicine and that kept me pregnant. 

P: So they’re just trying to stop the preterm labor. That’s what 

R; they just tried to stop the preterm labor. That medicine makes your the your resting heart rate 120 beats a minute which pushes a lot of blood to the baby. And usually what they would what they told me and Israelis are so much fun. They all are very they’re very verbal. They I was told that the person who laid in my bed before me the baby, their baby died. I was told that Udipar babies because the name of the drug was up to Udipar. Babies are very big. I was very I was carrying very big. I was for the first time in years having all the rest I needed. I had no if you can imagine this is 1988. But he was born October 88. I had no computer no phone, no radio, no TV. No telephone next to my bed. 

P: Yeah. 

R: Okay. I’m in a birthing hospital at Women’s Hospital in the center of Jerusalem. And I sat in a room and watch the clouds go for six months. It was very boring. My ex husband refused to bring me magazines and books but other people did. I got visited by any everyone I ever knew. I got to see my kids a little bit not very much. And we had various babysitters taking care of them. Finally my ex husband’s cousin who had kids the same age to took my two kids in and that that was the first time that they were based and fair. There was like a few months there that they were just like abandoned children. And they got through you know, we got we got through. In the beginning of my ninth month. The doctor came into my room and said, Okay, now you can get up we’re gonna take you off the medicine. Laying upside down was uncomfortable in the beginning, but after that I got used to it if you laid me in regular bed it felt uncomfortable, right because it was so long. 

P: yeah

R: And then when I got up to walk around the first time, I was super dizzy. I was surprised that I didn’t faint. I mean, it was really hard to get up and actually like leave the hospital leave the ward. They so they said to me get up and you know, walk around, stop all the drugs. And because anytime in your ninth month you can give birth and there was a nun, a Christian woman who had come in she was a midwife, and she was doing a stent in the hospital. And she examined me and she said, your baby’s not big. Your belly is filled with liquid. Now I wasn’t bleeding. There, no blood was coming out of me. But it seems at the end. What happened was that tear never healed. 

P: Wow. 

R: It never healed and I was bleeding into my uterus, the entire pregnancy. So I got up and I’m walking around and everything and I stopped taking these drugs that are putting giving, making my heart rate so high. My in laws come to Jerusalem to spend the Sukkah holiday the full holiday. And so they’re with us for Yom Kippur. There were this for I’m not sure I don’t remember Rosh Hashanah, but they were with us for Yom Kippur and they were with us for circus and sometimes around circus. My mother in law says to me, you know, Rachel you don’t. He’s like, you know, like, you know, the baby or the baby making you uncomfortable? Which was an odd question. Just an odd question to pull out of the sky. 

And believe me, I just wanted to not think about anything too much at that point, right. I’m 25 years old. I just want to have this baby and get on with my life. But when she said it, I started to think you know, wow, it’s true. I’m really not feeling the baby moving. So they took my two older daughters and they sent us back to our apartment to have a night alone. And I got into our bathtub. And I was playing with my stomach and the baby wasn’t really reacting. So we went to the hospital, and they get a monitor and they said the baby’s sleeping. And my doctor came in and told me to go home. And around that time, there was a hospital in Tel Aviv called Assuta some financial room with another person, or there was some help find that dislike position. There’s a 4040 minute drive between one city and the next. So they moved their practices into the hospital in Jerusalem where I had stayed and they were seeing their, their their patients they’re giving, letting their patients deliver there. And when I came back in the My doctor told me keep coming in for a monitor. When I came back in the next day, one of these doctors saw me and he said, You need a cesarean section. And he put me in a bed overnight. In fact, he put me back in the same bed where I had been for six months. 

P: oh, Wow. 

R: I got up in the next morning my doctor came in. This is the mean this is the doctor who right had been had been very commanding and demanding during my birth. He came in and said go home. And I said well what about with the other doctor? He says no, no, you know and I heard you know with my La leche training my you know, all of that like all that you know, right? Breathe through all your all your deliveries and don’t ever take a you know, so it’s just an aspirin. I heard Oh, a doctor just wants to give me since you know it’s gonna give me a bunch of tests and a C section. So I ran home and we went in every night to get a monitor and every monitor the baby was asleep and 

P: we don’t think this is weird at some point.

R: About five days and again, my doctor wasn’t there and another Assumpta doctor saw me and said this monitor doesn’t look okay. Let come into this room and he put me on he laid me down. He put on an ultrasound machine. And he started to zap my belly with little electric thing. Okay, like a taser. Okay, but I’m sure much less electricity. He was zapping me and trying to wake her up. And she’s kept on sleeping. And he said, Listen, you really need to get this baby out of you. Like now. And my doctor came in and said, Rachel, go home, and come back in tomorrow for another monitor. And I said, Well, why don’t you go over and talk to that other guy? He seems to think that I need a cesarean section. 

So they the two of them talk to each other and he comes up to me and he says, Okay, we are going to admit you now. We want you to go home to sleep come in tomorrow morning first thing we are going to do labor. I said okay, we go home to sleep. The whole night of like feeling contractions we come in the next morning, the we go into a delivery room and while there went to get the suppositories to induce labor, my ex husband and the the midwife suggests all births in Israel are midwife births and the midwives do all the birthing unless there’s a reason for a doctor to come in. So the midwife is going to do is going to put in the induction and both of them are saying to me, it’s going to be a really long day you’re going to have a really long day. It’s going to be a long birth induction is really hard. You need to eat something so because they asked me to I took a little tiny, itty bitty piece of bread. And she goes she puts her hand in and she says where’s the baby’s head and I said the baby is breech. The baby has been breach the entire pregnancy. I’ve been seen by everyone your doctors, like no one ever talked to each other. She said you cannot deliver a vaginal birth with a baby who is breech. And I was like okay, so they put me in a bed. And then the doctor comes in and he goes and he sits down in the bed next to me. He says all along, I knew you needed a C section. And I said okay, Bozo that’s great. So I said let’s go to C section he says because you eight we can’t give you a C section. Until a number of hours have gone by. So you have to wait until three o’clock in the afternoon.

 I said okay, but there’s a doctor who this guy had insisted was at my first two births. And he was the head of neonatology and the shard set of hospital which is another Jerusalem hospital. And I said, everything else equal. I want that guy in the hospital when my daughter is born. And he said, we didn’t even know that she was a daughter at that point, but maybe four and he’s and he said, Well, you know what, Professor Adelson, the neonatologist, his son is having a bar mitzvah this afternoon. So you’re gonna just have to deal with whoever’s in the hospital. And I’m like, okay, just get the baby out of me. So they put me in a recovery room off the operating suites. Right this is a women’s hospital. They’re not doing operations all day long. 

So they just put me in this empty room. On a bed where the copy someone went and got me a copy of the Jerusalem Post. And I’m not a big news but I’m sitting on this bed and they did put an infusion in my arm. And one of the other midwives come in an American woman. Now you can imagine I lived in this very small hospital for six months. Everybody knows me knows my story. So she comes in and she had like this like fakie smile on and she says, Rachel, what are you doing here? And I said, you know, Regina, I’m starting. I’m waiting to have such and such but you know, I’m feeling contractions. Maybe I’ll still be able to deliver naturally right? That whole 

P: Yeah, 

R: mentality to never have a C section. And she said, why don’t we get you on a fetal heart monitor and see what’s going on. So she hooked me up to the fetal heart monitor and turns it on, and the baby’s heartbeat, like within 30 seconds of it going on the baby’s heartbeat drops and doesn’t come back up. So that was it. My daughter died right at that moment. And so she puts out some alarm. Next thing I know, they’re like, you know, 40 people surrounding me surrounding my bed, they get an oxygen mask on me they put the infusion of Hi my ex husband by the way had left after I had the piece of bread and before the midwife realized that the baby was breech. My husband went to get the car fixed. So he had been gone home. He had been gone the whole morning and he walked in exactly at that moment. 

They take me into the operating room. They’re tying down my arms. They’re cutting off my clothes and Professor Adelman, the shartizedik neonatologist walks into the room. He puts his hands on either side of my head. And he said I was going to invite your husband and he looks worse than you do. So just give us peace and just give us a few minutes and we’re going to take care of you. And then they put me to sleep. I woke up later, unwilling to hear any bad news because he came to he came to talk to me and I and I he said Your daughter was born with an Apgar of one and I think he was being generous. And I and I just answered him. What was it five minutes later? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t hear that she hadn’t survived or that there was any bad news at all. And so he left I was after C section. So I was stuck in my bed. This professor Adelman stayed with her that whole night. My ex husband went out to the bigger Hadassah hospitals and got blood for her she had two blood transfusions that night. And that he saved her life. He missed his son’s Bar Mitzvah and saved my daughter’s life. 

We were in the hospital for about five days after that. After three days, I think she came out of there just had her in a in an incubator, but I don’t think for any more other reason than to monitor she was about eight pounds. Maybe seven and a half pounds eight pounds. So she wasn’t under sized she was just didn’t have enough oxygen in her blood. Before I left the hospital. Professor Adelman explained to me that her blood oxygen level was on the line between two too low and safe, like right on the line and that we should take her every couple of weeks to the pediatrician. You know that thing that they do when they open up the babies? You know, they check their arms? Yeah, they push the baby’s knees up and then open up their hips. 

P: 

R: Yeah, but all of that is to feel that the baby has normal, a normal normal tone in their muscles, muscles and bones. And a kid with brain damage won’t. And by the time she was three months old, they felt it we got her you know the first ultrasounds and MRIs and we got her into occupational therapy and physical therapy right when she was really small. And today she’s a 33 year old woman there. She has a certain kind of cerebral palsy. Called nonverbal learning disorders. It’s right hemisphere damage, which basically means that she’s incredibly smart. She can read any book, she can learn any language. She has an incredible memory. And then there’s a whole lot of stuff that she just completely can’t do, like put a car between two lines in a parking space or even to know which foot shoe goes on with which foot without trying. She lives in an assisted living facility right near here. And she’s doing really, really well and she’s a she’s a great, she’s a great lady.

P: That’s an amazing story. And I am so moved by that doctor’s efforts to save her. 

R: Yeah. I wish that there had been a book better ultrasound machine and they could have looked and seen that there that care was there the whole time. But even that, even if they had what would we have done differently? And it wasn’t as if there weren’t the people came to me when I was pregnant and said, How? Just get up I think my mother came one at one point and said just go home and take care of your kids. And if you lose this baby, you lose this baby like why are you holding on so tight? I was terrified at the idea and while I was laying in that bed, I had a rolling tape in my head, please God, if this baby has to have something wrong, that it should be physical and not intellectual and that the baby should be able to enjoy your world. That was my prayer. And I just had it on, you know, constant rewind right? In my brain, even when I was talking to people and whatever was going on. I just was constantly constantly had that prayer. And it’s interesting that she she always went to regular school she wasn’t in special ed, she she happens to be an incredibly brilliant person. She can’t survive on her own like, you know, living in an apartment. Whoever she marries, she won’t be able they won’t you know they’ll need all kinds of special support. But she’s a brilliant like is really brilliant. Woman with a very wry sense of humor. This incredible vocabulary, this great desire to know she’s very into politics. She likes the news. She’s She just she just has her a great need to know so much and it’s so much follows what I asked for so I’ve always told her she is my she’s my class in my believing might she’s my you know, like reassurance and belief in a higher power. Because you know that was that that prayer was answered.

P: Yeah, that’s amazing. And so, five days later you leave the hospital and you come home and it’s just….

R: He said you have to do days that I’m giving you back for kids and yeah, and it was just get on with it. My mother in law showed up in the hospital and decided that my daughter should be called Bhatia. My mother in law had a cousin who had polio and her name was Basha Devorah and Basha is kind of the Yiddish way of saying Battia but him means daughter of God and it is known in the Bible is the name of the daughter of Pharaoh in Egypt who took Moses out of the river. Her name was Battia here, and about two or three months after she was born, I went to a wedding and she was in a carrier on my chest. I had a teacher, a teacher who taught me Hebrew Bible, right, a Torah teacher, a very holy woman in Jerusalem, and she was at the wedding and she came up to me and she said, Oh, this is the baby who you worked so hard for. 

And I said, Yes, this is the baby and I, you know, showed her the baby and, and she said, What did you name her? And I said, you know, I really wanted to name her NESEA which would have been God’s miracle. A name that by the way, my kids absolutely hate. And every time I tell this story, they’re like, Oh, please, if you’d call her NESEA we would have like killed you. I said, I wanted to call her NESEA and my mother in law I mean, you can imagine how angry I, I am to this day, right? Could I maybe had I stayed for Passover, I would have healed. So the teacher goes into the sort of meditation. She goes into this meditation and she says, you know, if you had called her NESEA God’s miracle, it would have been is if God did one miracle for this person, and then was kind of done. She said, but by calling her Battia, by calling her daughter of God, you know that God will keep doing miracles for her over and over and over again. And that’s really how her her life has gone. Their stories even more miraculous than the one I just don’t feel about the life of bots yet is a very wonderful, it’s a wonderful thing that that had that she survived. She’s just this amazing person

P: that is an amazing ending to this pregnancy and so joyful that she’s doing so well and has had such a full life and continues to have a full life. I’m wondering after that pregnancy, how do we get a fourth.

R: She was in nursery school, and the Rabbi of our town, his his daughter invited us over for a playdate and at that play date she told me she said something like, people like you shouldn’t have more kids. And I was like, why not? Why would you say something like this to me? And then if you recall back in the beginning, I I told you that my kids were my feeling right so having a baby, but not having them every year and a half. 

P: yeah, yeah Yeah, 

R: so shimmy was born three and a half years after Bhatia. I wanted to have a son and he was a son. And three years later, no, four years later, we had another daughter Kayla, and then three years after she was born, we had son mayor and Mayor was born 1999 I think I would have continued. I had more kids except there was a second intifada. And we went for a few years to live in America and that kind of put the kibosh on having more kids. So 

P: I was thinking that your experience with your daughter is pretty scary and hard on you and hard on your family with the bed rest and so to walk back into pregnancy, I just wonder how many of those fears you bring with you about like what if I

R: all of them there at one point I thought I was having a really contractions with shimmy. And I went back to the same hospital that that women’s hospital and nobody would talk to me nobody would touch me. We really considered suing the head of the hospital. But it was known in Jerusalem that this guy was manipulative. They had all kinds of friends on the inside, even with judges and other people, that he was an influencer that he was and that he wasn’t only now practicing on me. 

We decided to put our energies into taking care of the baby and getting her all the therapies and whatever else she needed. When I was pregnant with Jimmy, I went back in the hospital one night, nobody would talk to me. And that’s when I went to the second doctor, the one who swabbed me was working by then in a different an old little religious hospital in the center, another area of Jerusalum and that’s where I gave birth to the to the last three was their shimmy. First of all was 10 pounds. 

P: Wow. 

R: And he was a VBAC in the operating room after they had put in the app. When they went to put in the epidural. I had a contraction and I had been in transition labor with contractions coming every minute for four hours. And when they put that needle in and breathing through the whole thing, and then they put that needle in right when I had a contraction, I let out the biggest scream. And the baby came down enough that he was vaccum extracted. 

P: Oh wow. 

R: And in the operating room. The next day on the ward. People were like did you hear that woman screaming and I was just like

P: not i Yeah, well good. I’m glad that it was a different road for the rest of them. It is a I had a challenging first pregnancy and then I there’s a lot of consternation at my house about would we walk into another pregnancy after having so much trouble the first time and we did like you we did, but that was a that was a hard step to take and my family who had been really supportive, was super mad that I got pregnant again and ended up being supportive in the end, but the trauma and the difficulty of all the things you went through in that third pregnancy I have a kind of lingering effect.

 

R: when I was at the end of my ninth with shimmy, and my ex husband was called to do his reserve duty in the army. And I said to him No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This time you told the army No, no, no, you’re not going. If he had gone and then was called home, that would have been fine. But because he told them no. The next several times that he did reserve duty he got like the worst duty that you could possibly have in the worst areas. And every time he would come home and say you see see what because I was just a little bit of a wreck. Absolutely.

P: it is like a leap after having that kind of experience to go back into it and have another one but it’s fabulous that your other three nobody else encountered those issues.

 

R: No, it was there was there was something wrong. I mean, remember I got pregnant using a diaphragm that didn’t fit. Yeah, I got I had had a morning after pill. Yep. When the pregnancy attached itself it didn’t attach itself well. And the only reason Battia survived is because she is the most tenacious person I’ve ever met in my entire life.

P: I like that consistency from 10 weeks when you see her the ultrasound to 33. Right. Very cool.

R: I’m gonna I’m gonna leave you with just a very brief story. She is in seventh grade. We’re living in America. I’m working for a hedge fund. The hedge fund manager is one of the real big, brilliant Wall Street guys totally under the radar. Most of the money that he’s trading his own and we are for people trading $600 billion and he has a big interest in medical devices because his father’s a doctor in a well visit. Battia’s heartbeat is heard and right after we got to America and she was having so much trouble because here in Israel, it’s really easy to streamline the special needs kid and in America. It’s so much more difficult, especially in the Jewish world. 

So we get to a well visit and the doctor hears her heartbeat and says I hear something wrong. And she gets hysterical and I said don’t worry about it. Your father has a heart murmur all his family don’t even think about it. That spring I go to Him and ask Him to fill out forms for her to go to summer camp. And he says Did you ever take her to the cardiologist? And I said no. And so we make the appointment of the cardiologist. I can’t go you’re not you know, for people managing $600 million. You show up at 730 You leave at 530 in the afternoon. And you do not move from your desk. So my ex husband took her to the cardiologist and he came to pick me up and he was like crying and he said Bhatia has a hole in her heart. About 25% of people like the baby’s head is open here. That the heart is open and it doesn’t 100% Close. It’s called an arterial septic defect. Well that day at the hedge fund the boss had come over to me and said these are the kind of companies we like to look at that you should keep your eyes open for and it was like in the middle of the afternoon like 233 o’clock and I was really tired. So I just started to go through and I opened up the first company in the file, and I opened up and it’s this company that had made a medical device. It used to be that you had to have open heart surgery and crack the chest, open the entire heart sew up the middle and then put it all back together again. This guy had come up with a going in through an artery in the groin. snaking a laparoscopic tube into the heart with a little camera on it. Take a picture that measures exactly the size of the home. And then they have like a whole box of like these little umbrellas, the close they take the tube out the screw on the right side Sunbrella they sneak it back in and right between a heartbeat they put the umbrella through open it and unscrew it and pull the laparoscopic tube out and the umbrella material creates heart muscle to be just to grow.

P: holy crap…wow

R: so that afternoon I’m watching this little video of how there’s an operation that afternoon while by the neurologist I’m watching this video of this new thing that had just been developed. There are only two doctors in the United States doing this procedure on children, the guy who developed it and he’s in New York and the guy at Children’s Hospital in Boston. So we call we go to the doctor I had great insurance. I worked with a hedge fund. We go to we call this doctor I said yeah, I’m working at this particular hedge fund and he says Oh Can we roll out the red carpet for you because it was my boss that gave all the money to develop this. This thing now that they do it everywhere today. Okay, but there then it was brand new. And I get in the car my husband’s crying Battia has a hole in our heart. I’m like it’s no big deal. They have these like little umbrellas. So you can imagine I thought to myself afterwards, you know she went through the surgery. She was overnight at Columbia Presbyterian. She’s back at school two days. Later. 

P: Yeah. 

R: And if you can imagine, I thought to myself, I must really God must really love me. Who does that for a mother. Like gives him the information first?

P: I agree. I agree. All I could think was daughter of God. Right. So well named.  That’s it. That’s amazing. And I’m glad that was fixed. 

Thank you for sharing your amazing story. 

R: thank you for having me This was really wonderful. 

P: As suggested at the front end, Rachel’s is a story of resilience and toughness…to manage the infection after the second pregnancy, the hemorrhage during the third pregnancy, the placental tear, the months of bedrest, the uncertainty around the timing of the birth, and then the C section seems like a steep uphill climb…to manage all of that at a pretty young age, and then to have three more children–I think of it as a story of unvarnished strength that includes both heroism, kindness and medical intrigue…thanks so much to Rachel for sharing it…and thank you for listening.