NEW ORLEANS — A mother will celebrate this Mother's Day with her new baby boy, but the road to bring him into the world, and get him healthy, was a long one, with many wins and losses.
Mother's Day Sunday will be very special for Nicole Hardeman. She is celebrating her baby Jones, after a team of LSU Health doctors saved his life, at three different LCMC hospitals, Touro, Children's Hospital and East Jefferson General Hospital.
“I'd walk into the NICU every day, and just like, what are the doctors going to tell me today. Sometimes it was good news. Sometimes it was scary news,” said Hardeman.
That was for her baby girl Bryant, who didn't make it in 2020. She was only one month old. You see, when her oldest child, five-year-old Lincoln was born on the east coast, doctors thought Nicole had one problem with her uterus, but when Bryant was born, at only 24 weeks, doctors in New Orleans discovered it was a different uterine problem. At one point, Nicole thought she'd never be able to have more children.
“I fell apart, but it was like not fair that, it's like I lost her and the possibility to have more, and that was like, that tore me apart,” she remembers.
Surgery fixed the problem, and then baby Jones was on the way, but something completely different went wrong with his pregnancy.
“I cried immediately. It was what has happened repeatedly when it comes to me ... bringing children into this world, is every time I go to the doctor, it seems like there's another punch.”
Jones had a urinary tract obstruction. So, in the womb, he could not drink fluid or make more. He was delivered six weeks early, and in surgery at only two days old. Nicole credits her doctors like Dr. Rachel Reitan, for finding the problem before it seriously damaged his kidneys.
“Nicole is an amazing woman, her, she was compliant with everything. She would call me with everything She saved our babies,” said Dr. Rachel Reitan, LSUHSC OB-GYN who practices at LCMC hospitals.
Nicole is grateful to her lost little girl Bryant, for exposing the uterine problem so she could conceive Jones. She thanks Saul's Light, the foundation that help's parents who lose infants for helping her cope. And she thanks her first child, Lincoln.
“I could not imagine going through Mother's Day as a mother of loss and no kids. It made me just very sad for the mothers who do experience it without another kid anchoring them,” said Hardeman.
Baby Jones is doing well, but will still have to be monitored, and on medication, to make sure the problem with his urinary tract does not come back.