How Long Should You Wait To Take A Newborn Out

Mothers and daughters build a strong bond through a lifetime of shared experiences. For Riki Graves and her infant daughter Juliana, information technology has only taken a few months, thanks to dual medical battles that each have fought…and won.

When she was 2 months pregnant, Riki Graves, 38, was diagnosed with chest cancer.

"I don't take time for breast cancer," idea Graves. But the working mom of a 3-yr-old boy immediately dove into cancer treatment. She had a lumpectomy, so a second surgery to remove the lymph nodes in her right breast.

At her twenty-calendar week ultrasound, Graves was thrilled to learn that she was having a girl, then devastated when doctors diagnosed her daughter with a congenital heart defect. The baby had a hole in her heart and wasn't pumping blood properly. Graves was told that the baby may non survive the pregnancy.

"I went from beingness excited virtually the pregnancy to freaking out," Graves says. "I said, 'This tin can't be happening. You know I have breast cancer, right?'"

Oncologists at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston recommended that Graves have chemotherapy. Doctors bodacious her that information technology was safe while meaning and wouldn't harm the baby. Indeed, the medical community has made great strides in contempo years in learning how to treat significant women for cancer without sacrificing the baby.

Related link: Significant with cancer, and healing for 2

Juliana Graves got a heart transplant 17 days after she was born. — Juliana Graves got a middle transplant 17 days after she was born. Today

Still, Graves worried that chemo would stress her already sick baby likewise much.

Doctors said at that place was a 17 percent take chances of the cancer coming back if Graves didn't have chemo, and a 14 percent run a risk of recurrence if she did have chemo.

Graves decided to pause her cancer treatment, skip chemo, and look to have radiations until subsequently her girl was built-in. "To me, at that fourth dimension, information technology was not worth information technology," she says.

Graves quit her task equally a health care administrator, and her husband, Chris Graves, a major in the Texas Army National Guard, took leave. The family moved from Corpus Christi to Houston to exist closer to Texas Children'south Hospital.

Meanwhile, their babe'southward centre condition worsened.

When Juliana was born Apr ix, surgeons said her heart wasn't strong enough for the surgeries she needed to survive. Doctors gave the couple two options: They could accept the infant home and say goodbye. Or, they could put her on a centre transplant list. Only, doctors cautioned, it'south nigh impossible to get a newborn heart.

Comfortless, the couple had some other difficult decision to make. Graves's maternal fetal medicine doctor told Graves that if she wanted to attempt to get pregnant again, she would assistance. Graves said no. "I told everybody, 'I don't want another infant. I want THIS little girl,'" she says.

Juliana Graves with her dad, Chris Graves Today

She put her daughter on the transplant list. "I wasn't ready to requite up promise yet," Graves says.

5 days after — when Juliana was 17 days old — she got a new heart.

"It was a perfect match," Graves says. "Information technology was the perfect size. And it was really strong."

Immediately, Juliana started improving. Her skin turned from grey to pink. "We telephone call her our miracle baby," Graves says.

Juliana went abode from the infirmary on June xvi. The family at present lives about 20 minutes from Houston's Medical Centre — where mother and baby both all the same have regular appointments. Graves, who resumed cancer treatment after Juliana's birth, has completed her final radiation therapy.

"Juliana and I fought our battle," Graves says, adding that both she and her daughter are feeling stronger and healthier.

"She's a feisty niggling girl," Graves says of Juliana. "If she wasn't such a trivial fighter — she wouldn't be hither."