My wife and I are having our second boy! The due date was supposed to be January 8th. We were very excited when we found out in May that we were pregnant. We had just had a miscarriage in February and learning about the pregnancy news was just a huge breath of fresh air.

However, a few months later on August 25th we found out our baby had spina bifida and we had to wait another few weeks to figure out what spinal level it was at, how severe the defect was, and what kind of interventions there were for the baby. We learned that the baby had a myeloschisis at S1 level which we were relieved to hear because most leg function comes from the Lumbar spinal level.

As far as interventions go, we opted to do a percutaneous fetoscopic spina bifida repair (in-utero) with the hope that for the remainder of the pregnancy the baby could develop in-utero. This is supposed to help improve walking, urinary continence, hindbrain herniation reversal, and some other things you might see with a SB patient. My wife was told that she would be on strict bed rest at home after the pregnancy was over, which was hard to hear because we have a 3 year old that is just so full of energy, and I'm in grad school, so that meant I needed to rely on family and ward members to step up if I didn’t want to drop out of the program, and they’ve been super supportive of course.

I called my school program director to inform her that it would be a possibility that my wife would be in labor during finals week because the surgeon who performed the SB repair explained that typically his patients on average give birth at 37 weeks, which just so happens to be my finals week. The director made it clear to me that she couldn’t provide accommodations during finals week, such as being able to take virtual finals (which is what we have done in the past few terms due to covid) because they are trying to bring everything back on campus again. I would need to take them on campus just like everybody else.

So a couple of weeks ago we ended up having the surgery in LA. Everything was looking great! The defect was fixed, the CSF was flowing the way it’s supposed to, and we had a lot of positives from that surgery. My wife had been doing a great job of staying off her feet despite my 3 year old’s efforts to thwart that. And then all of a sudden, her water breaks today…🤦🏼‍♂️ Such awful luck!

We’re now sitting in a San Diego hospital and my wife will be here for the remainder of her pregnancy as the hospital tries to delay labor for as long as possible. The baby will be born before its due date, and once he is stable enough be transferred up to LA where the surgeons/doctors who assisted with the surgery can keep tabs on him, we will get him home hopefully in late December/early January…

I know that so many other people have way more crap going on than what my wife and I are currently experiencing, but this is definitely the hardest thing we’ve dealt with. I just wanted to document how I’m feeling right now so that I can look back on this and remember how we felt. Thanks for taking the time to read this!