The Three Comets Meet the Autumnal Full Moon: A Suprise Birth Story

By Darwin and Danielle

Told in two parts, a family shares the incredible story of their surprise birth, highlighting the range of perinatal experiences and the importance of community. Darwin first came to Perinatal Support Washington through the Dad Support Group, of which he said, “I benefited from hearing like-minded folks share how they have handled certain challenges of fatherhood.”

Danielle:

According to WebMD, approximately 1 in 2,500 women do not know that they are pregnant until labor begins. This is known as a cryptic pregnancy. This is how our family of two became a family of three. 

For several months, my husband, Darwin, and I had been watching a few of our close friends go through the journey of preparing for their newborns, and all that comes with becoming first-time parents and bringing a new human into the world.  Last May, we got to celebrate our friends welcoming their baby boy. I had been hearing about doctor visits and seeing sonograms of their son. At my job, I thought I was living vicariously through what it was like to become first-time parents. Little did I know, I was also carrying a human being inside of me. 

Both Darwin and I work in jobs that are long and also demanding physically and mentally, especially during the holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.  I had decided to take the first weekend of November off to do some organizing and cleaning around the apartment and to spend some quality time with Darwin, because we had thought we would be two ships passing in the night. Sunday, November 2nd, what we thought was a normal Sunday together is when our lives were changed forever. 

This particular Sunday, we went to church and had plans to go out for lunch somewhere in our neighborhood. During church, I was feeling a lot of abnormal, excruciating pain up and down my back and stomach. I remember leaving to use the restroom multiple times during church, and right before it ended, I had left to use the restroom again, but this time it was debilitating, and I was hotter than usual. I texted from the bathroom stall, “Hey, we need to go now. I am in a lot of pain.” We came home, I took some Ibuprofen, put back on my man pajamas, and lay down on our couch thinking that if I rested, I would feel better. The pain kept getting sharper and worse. By this time, my husband had gone to the West Seattle YMCA, and I texted him that I was on the floor and the pain that I was experiencing was not going away, and that I was going to call 911 to have an ambulance take me to the emergency room. He came home right away from the gym, and he decided to take me to urgent care, and that was when we entered the Twilight Zone. 

All I remember is patiently waiting for the receptionist to finish with another patient. It was my turn and I told them I needed help immediately. While standing there in the reception area, my body began to shut down. While going through this excruciating pain, I had to deal with the red tape of the bureaucracy of our health care system. The receptionist insisted that I show them my health insurance card. I went through my phone to find my card and couldn’t remember my password and I was standing there trying to change my password but the pain kept getting worse and worse. The next thing I know, I fell down to the ground in front of the desk in a fetal position, begging to get help, and saw there was a person waiting in line shaking their head. 

I was finally able to get the help that I desperately needed. All I remember is one of the nurses following me in the bathroom to give me a vial to urinate in, and coming back in after I told them that I could not urinate. That is when the nurse asked, while putting her fingers up in my private area, “Are you pregnant?” She ran out of the bathroom screaming, “This woman is dilated and is in labor.” They wheeled me out of the bathroom onto a table. They had called the paramedics and the fire department and I was screaming bloody murder. Darwin, in the meantime, was wondering what was going on and when he could see me, as the EMT rushed in and ran back to me. That’s when he was told that I was being taken to Swedish and that I was going into labor. 

At Swedish, we were still in shock. We were not prepared. Our second bedroom became a storage space and was not ready to welcome a baby. As we waited for the doctors to give me an epidural, we were calling our friends and family on the unexpected news. In the blur, I do remember telling Darwin, “We don’t have a car seat.” Darwin’s response, “We can go home with the baby without a car seat.” I just shook my head no. Ten hours later, via C-Section, we welcomed our baby girl, Audrie Helen! At first, we were apprehensive because we didn’t know the gestational period or if she had arrived too early. We were preparing for the worst, that she would be in NICU for the first several weeks or months of her life. Once she was delivered, we were told that she was about three to four weeks early. She spent one hour in NICU before we were able to leave the delivery area and go to our temporary home for the week. The nurses who helped us get through this critical time were extremely generous to both of us. Right before I had gone into the operating room, I said, “I can’t believe I didn’t know I was pregnant. What kind of person am I?” One of the nurses replied, “There’s a TLC show on this.” Her reply kind of made me feel better but the human side of me could feel all the judgement that I was going to receive once other people found out. We are extremely grateful to our team of nurses and doctors who got us through this time. We owe them a lot! 

All we can say is that it really does take a village to raise a child. Word of our news spread through our church community. We had three amazing women helping Darwin clean our apartment and get the baby’s room ready while I was ordering things from Amazon. We even got a car seat so that we could take Audrie Helen home with us! We received a lot of donated items, meals, and visitors during this whirlwind. 

I was supposed to go back to work that Wednesday, but couldn’t because of this unexpected surprise. That Monday, I sent out a picture to my boss, who had just left to go on paternity leave the month before, of me holding Audrie Helen. “Cute baby. Um, Danielle, whose baby is that?” So the conversations continued in an unexpected, concerned fashion. We have now fully embraced the calling, but to think back on those early days, it is a true testament to how community can rally around someone in an extreme time of need. We are so glad that we have made it to this point and are eager to see what lies ahead.

Darwin:

On Sunday, November 2nd, I woke up a married man with a set routine, and by the end of that day when I fell asleep at 3 AM, my life was changed forever. The day started with me reading scripture at church, 2nd Corinthians 3:16-18, referencing a lifting of a veil and being presented with a newfound freedom, and I never could have realized how poignant that message was. Upon returning home, I brought Danielle some pain relief as she was complaining about a debilitating sensation in her abdomen. I told her to take it easy and that we would skip our afternoon outing. I then proceeded to head out for a YMCA visit and the Farmer’s Market. While enjoying myself at the market I suddenly received a message from my wife that my outing needed to be cut short right as I was deciding on which Kombucha flavor to bring home, and little did we know we would soon be bringing home far more. Upon returning home, I found Danielle buckling over in pain, and I swept her off to Urgent Care, where she had a hard time getting assistance due to it being her first doctor’s visit in several years.

I paced outside and kept praying that she would be alright and trusting that whatever was ailing her, we could turn it around. The next thing I knew a firetruck and ambulance showed up out front and the situation turned even more chaotic. Hearing shrieks of pain coming from the patient’s room and recognizing her voice, my mind started racing to all the possibilities of what could be causing her so much agony. Due to the Hippocratic oath, I had to ask the receptionist several times to let me into the room, a minor annoyance for them, but the unease of not knowing what was happening was making me crazed. Finally, I got the clearance, and as I walked into her room, the nurse told me to take several deep breaths, saying I was in for the surprise of my life. I found my wife surrounded by half a dozen firefighters and medics with her legs spread open wide and the first contractions starting. 

We had spent ample years talking about the possibility of having a kid and we accepted that it was most likely not in the cards for us. Having turned over every rock, we accepted our fate and had mulled over the idea of adopting. However, when I found out my wife was pregnant and there was no time to waste, my whole life flashed before my very eyes. Thankfully, the team of medics and firefighters whisked her out of the room onto a stretcher and off to Swedish Hospital in Capitol Hill. With my head spinning with the image of my wife on that table in Urgent Care surrounded by a dozen people, I realized that my fate had been sealed but our future was still unclear. After a hurried conversation with a firefighter in the parking lot, I was speeding off to Swedish Hospital, thinking about my future seemingly from a bird’s eye view. 

Upon entering the delivery ward, I was instructed to take this all in very slowly because the nurses knew the shock that I was about to face could leave one buckling at the knees. I kept my gait steady and told the team of nurses that I needed to hear what our future looked like, and she assured me that none of it was clear, but they would work their hardest to bring us to the next horizon. Finding out that my wife had reached some level of stability, and that she was deep in the contraction phase, I strolled out to the hallway and looked East towards the Cascades and knew that, like nature, things would work out as they were meant to be. 

The night was long, arduous, and full of uncertainty as nurse after nurse came in attempting to get us through the final countdown. We had the added pressure of not knowing how pre-term our beautiful baby would be and being unsure what my wife’s own health outlook would be. That night we were visited by a reassuring force that can only be described as divine intervention and a visit of a guardian angel named Sandy Timmer. Thank goodness for Sandy, as she stayed with us the whole night and kept her hand on Danielle’s shoulder, telling her this would all work out exactly as it was meant to. We each had our many memories flash before our eyes as we anticipated beginning a whole new set of memories with a gift we never knew we would receive. Finally, the doctor suggested a C-section as Danielle had been pushing for nearly eight hours, and she did not see this as a natural birth due to my wife’s pubic bone creating a block on our baby’s head. Danielle made the call that it was time for the surgery, and we prepared for the next phase. 

Moving with my wife into the operating room, I felt a sense of calm that we had gotten this far and there was light at the end of the tunnel. The team proceeded to ready Danielle for surgery, and I kept my eyes on her like a hawk, telling her to hold on a little longer. They asked me if I would like to announce the gender at birth and cut the umbilical cord to which I agreed. Fifteen minutes later we had a baby that they quickly carried across the room and started warming up immediately. There had been concern that she could be up to 8 weeks premature, so they wanted to make sure she got as much attention as possible when she first got out of the womb. I fumbled the ball as I was in utter shock by the purplish blue baby that came out, but then I rushed over to the table and said, “It’s Audrie Helen.” She is named after both of our grandmothers and was just under three weeks early, weighing in at 5 pounds 11 ounces. They pushed Danielle back to our delivery room where Sandy was waiting to hear the great news and then the nurses took our Audrie Helen off to the NICU for a couple hours until she could join us in our room for the next three days. The morning my daughter was born, my life began again, and the out-of-body dream of daylight’s saving 2025 had led us to a future with boundless opportunities and a beautiful new reality.