I was diagnosed with fetomaternal alloimmunization, a condition in which a mother’s body creates antibodies against a fetus’ blood antigens. This diagnosis crushed us. My husband and I wanted a lot of children, and now we were left wondering whether we could even have a second.
“The doctor came in and handed me a box of tissues,” Katie recalls. “She was saying something about an abnormal pregnancy, shunts, abnormalities of the left leg, club foot. I was in complete shock at that point, and I couldn’t really make out what she was saying because it felt like time was suspended.”
In a span of two hours, their lives had been turned upside down.
When Brianne Jacobsen was 20 weeks pregnant, her ultrasound revealed that her developing baby’s internal organs were sticking out of its abdomen. The birth defect, known as an omphalocele, required the higher level of expertise of the UC Davis Fetal Care and Treatment Center team.
“He has so much joy. He’s always smiling, even if it’s a hard day,” says Mandy, Kaleb’s mom. “It’s weird to think of what he has been through at such a young age, but he’s full of life despite all of it.”
When Beth Kanemoto was pregnant with identical twins Kai and Klay, it felt like every two weeks she received more bad news. First, they learned the pregnancy was high risk. Initially, doctors thought the twins might be conjoined, but they soon learned that instead, Klay and Kai were considered mono-mono twins, meaning that they shared just one amniotic sac with no barrier between them.