My Pregnancy with Heather

Heather's pregnancy was not my least stressful. In December, at about 5 months, my thyroid goitered. They ran as many tests as they could without harming Heather and realized I had cancer of the thyroid. All we could do was wait. In the meantime the business (Staffels) that Clyde worked for, did not have health insurance and we had to pay for Heather out of pocket. Whenever you do that it is always more expensive and always up front. By mid-January, we had to have the whole payment into the hospital or they would not let us deliver in May! Suddenly my sister comes to save the day. She sent us a check from money she had been saving on her mission. It covered exactly what we needed to pay for Heather. It was the greatest miracle and blessing I had ever witnessed up to that time. It turned out that 1979 was a year of miracles. Heather's birth was miraculous and uneventful when in hindsight we realized she was a preemie (but she weighed over 7 pounds). Because of my thyroid it had caused her to grow faster than normal. But her fingernails were only halfway into the nail beds and she had stubby eyelashes (whereas her sister's had gone above her eyebrows). She was a jaundiced and later as I was struggling with her in school and some other issues and I was studying the affects of pre-mature births on education - it suddenly hit me full force that technically Heather was pre-mature even if she hadn't fit when she was born. She was very early but the only people that seem alarmed by that were my father (a physician) and my OBGyn. My pediatrician didn't pick up on it. We were sent home 24 hours after her birth (which was the norm in those days - for about a year).

Because of Heather's early birth and some other circumstances, I was able to have my surgery earlier than planned. Miracles and blessing occurred then that are for another blog. But today I wanted to say, I am grateful for a loving sister that saved the day. I am sure we would have scraped the money together somehow but Marianne made a stressful time, less stressful by her generous gift. I will always be grateful to her for her loving gift and for her sacrifices to make the gift possible.