by Iva Gutowski

Created on: September 27, 2009

When my mother was a young teenager, she began experimenting with drugs. She abused street drugs such as crank, and was known to steal prescription pads to fill fake prescriptions of painkillers. When she became pregnant, nothing changed. She continued to fulfill her desire to maintain a constant high, and received very little prenatal care.

I was born five weeks early and had to be sent to a hospital that could handle intensive care neonates. I weighed only four pounds seven ounces, and had a severe case of jaundice. I stayed at the hospital for four weeks before I could go home. At the time, the only clothes small enough to fit me were Cabbage Patch Doll clothes, and I had to have special formula and bottles ordered from the hospital.

My mother moved in with my grandmother when I came home from the hospital. She rarely changed a diaper or fed me, and soon thereafter, met a drug dealer that she thought she was in love with. I stayed with my grandmother. My grandmother loved me and took good care of me, but she had two other children at home and was forced to work a lot. I started staying with a baby-sitter that lived out in the country. I remember her yard was filled with red mud and I had to have a bath every night to get it all off of me.

About that time, my great-grandparents retired, and they were able to keep me while my grandmother was working. After a while, I didn't want to leave them. I wanted to live with them. My mother gave Mamaw and Papaw permission to adopt me, and at four years old, I finally had parents. After I was grown, and my Papaw was already in Heaven, I found out that Papaw had never been able to have children, (Mamaw had remarried after her first husband passed away related to injuries he acquired in World War II), and he had always prayed for a little baby girl. God answered his prayers, and I received a better life than I would have ever known otherwise.

After this brief background, I want to share a story of a little client I had recently while working as a student nurse. It was my rotation on OB, and I dreaded it. I had never been around babies and was quite frankly, scared to death. The first couple of days in OBI was on the Post Part-um unit, and it was pretty uneventful. I would bring babies to their mothers, and I was actually warming up to these new experiences. I loved to see the warmth that a mother had for her baby the first time she held it, and how the baby quit crying as soon as she picked it up.

Soon came

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