was 36 weeks pregnant when I felt it. My husband Ryan and I had just put our three children to bed, and we were watching TV when I felt our daughter Georgia do a complete 180° turn in my belly.
“This is weird,” I said, jumping up from the couch. “I don’t know what’s happening.” We considered calling the doctor, but Georgia seemed to settle down pretty quickly and was soon moving like normal again, so we decided it was probably nothing.
Eight months earlier, in September 2017, when I first learned I was pregnant with Georgia, Ryan and I were both shocked. I was 29 when I had our first daughter; now I was 36 and having our fourth child. Our older kids — Kendal is 7, Scarlett is 5, and Jack is 3 — were thrilled to have a little sister on the way. And I’ve always wanted that life where you have a bunch of kids and a full, happy house on the holidays. So even though I was technically having a geriatric pregnancy, once all the tests came back normal I put my worries aside and devoted my energy to my family and preparing for Georgia. We were all so excited. In fact, it wasn’t until that night on the couch that I began to question if maybe something was wrong.
The next morning, my stomach felt really sore. It wasn’t that unusual; throughout the entire pregnancy my belly would periodically feel really tight and painful. But I decided to call my midwife just in case. She came over and performed an in-home exam during which she discovered some bleeding, so she sent me to a nearby community hospital to get checked out. When the doctors did their scan we could hear Georgia’s heart beating really, really fast. In fact, it was so fast they thought their monitor might be broken, so they did a second scan with a separate handheld device, and it was the same. They didn’t seem particularly alarmed, but I was, so I asked for an ultrasound. As soon as I saw Georgia’s heart — it was fluttering like a butterfly — I became terrified. I’d never had a panic attack, but I went into a full-blown meltdown, shaking uncontrollably.
For Georgia’s sake, I did some yoga breathing exercises to calm myself down. The doctors ran more tests, but they still couldn’t figure out what was causing her heart to beat so fast, so they kept me overnight. When a maternal fetal medicine doctor returned the next morning and saw Georgia’s heart for herself, she had me transferred to Massachusetts General from our local hospital in a coastal town south of Boston. The doctors there ran more tests, and we all agreed that the best thing to do would be to induce me that night. We had a pediatric cardiologist in the delivery room as a precaution.
Georgia was born at 10:25 p.m. on May 18, 2018. Since I’d had an emergency C-section, I couldn’t see anything, but Ryan was watching the whole time.
“Looks like another Bowen baby!” he said when she came out. My immediate response was, “Great! But why isn’t she crying?”
I kept asking that over and over. Finally, she cried twice. But that was it. I wouldn’t hear her cry again for five weeks, because the doctors had to intubate her right there in the delivery room.
What Ryan wasn’t telling me at the time was that the doctors were doing chest compressions on Georgia for 15 or 20 minutes. He’d tried to go to Georgia, but the doctors told him to stay back. He was so insistent, at one point they tried to make him leave the room altogether but he refused. They wouldn’t tell us anything, so he just held my hand. Once the doctors managed to get Georgia somewhat stable, they brought her over so we could see her briefly. Her little body was grey, and I was so scared. We didn’t know until later, but Georgia hadn’t been crying because she’d gone into cardiac arrest and wasn’t with us for a period of time.
The following 24 hours were the worst hours of our lives. There were so many moments when Ryan and I actually thought we were going to lose our baby, so we had her baptized at the hospital.
Our older kids knew that I’d checked into the hospital two days earlier (they were staying with family about an hour away). They kept calling and asking, “Is the baby here? Is the baby here?” So Ryan and I decided we needed to tell them. We FaceTimed them and explained that their baby sister had arrived, but she was really sick and we weren’t sure what was going to happen. Kendal and Scarlett just started bawling. We’d all been waiting and preparing for Georgia for nine months, and they couldn’t comprehend why this was happening. That conversation was really, really hard. But Ryan and I didn’t want to wait and then have to say, “Yes, we had a baby, but she passed away.” We wanted them to know that she was here and alive for the time being.
It was another three or four hours before we learned that Georgia had also had a heart attack, most likely while she was still in utero. That flip she did in my belly could have been when it happened. We don’t really know. All we know is that when it happened, it damaged Georgia’s heart very badly, killing part of the muscle and causing her to go into cardiac arrest as she was being born. I’d never heard of a baby having a heart attack, but at that point we were in such a state of shock that nothing was unbelievable. It also didn’t matter. All that mattered is that something had happened, and now we had to help our daughter survive.
A 12-person medical team — including the Division Chief of Cardiovascular Intensive Care — arrived to transport Georgia to Boston Children’s Hospital roughly 10 minutes away. I’ve never felt so reassured in my life. I had had a C-section the day before, yet I’d been on my feet all day, running around trying to make decisions and be there for our daughter. Those nurses came in and immediately said, “Take a seat, we’ve got this.” And the division chief reassured me saying, “This is what we do: We save babies lives.” It’s true that my husband and I gave Georgia life, but in that moment we knew those doctors were going to be the one
After she was born, Georgia stayed alive thanks to machines that were doing the work of her heart and lungs while the doctors figured out what to do. The team at Boston Children’s Hospital proposed an experimental procedure. It involved taking a billion mitochondria from cells in Georgia’s healthy muscles and injecting them into the injured part of her heart, the idea being that the fresh mitochondria would revive the injured cells and repair her heart. The catch was that the procedure had only been done on 11 other babies before Georgia.
When they first suggested it, obviously we were weary. But they’d had a lot of success in their animal studies. Another thing that made us feel more comfortable was that the infusion was coming from Georgia’s own cells, so there was very little chance of an adverse reaction. She was basically on life support at that point, so giving the experimental procedure a try wasn’t going to hurt. We wanted to do whatever we could to give her a fighting chance.
We still can’t say for certain whether the procedure worked. In the previous experiments, they’d seen the cells start to revitalize the injured muscle almost immediately. But Georgia’s heart is so damaged that it doesn’t appear the infusion was able to make much of a difference. That’s not to say there hasn’t been some improvement over the last two months. Every scan has shown recovery and increased heart function. We’re now down to just one machine assisting Georgia’s left ventricular, which is huge. Our next step will likely be for Georgia to have a neonatal heart transplant, which is difficult because for that to happen, another family has to experience their own tragedy. I just keep reminding myself that it won’t be for nothing, because it will save Georgia’s life. We put her on the list a little more than two months ago and we’re told the wait is usually three to six months, so we’re just biding our time for now. She turned three months old last week.
Until we can bring Georgia home, nights and weekends are all about the big kids. Usually on Saturdays or Sundays we’ll cook breakfast together and then go to the beach. At some point we take them to see Georgia. They love her so much and are always fighting over who gets to hold her first and who gets to hold her the longest.
There’s this Edward Sharpe song that says, “Home is wherever I’m with you.” One day we were driving to the hospital and Scarlett said, “Mommy it’s okay that Georgia can’t be home with us, we’ll just bring home to her because we’re her home.” And I was like, “You’re so right.”
On weekdays, my husband and I split our time so that one of us is always at the hospital. I run a children’s clothing line called Petit Peony that has an online store and a brick-and-mortar location in Duxbury, Massachusetts, but I can still work from Georgia’s bedside.
The collection was inspired by my own kids and I still design everything based around what I want my children to wear. As chaotic as the last few months have been, Georgia has inspired me to launch a new line of clothes early next year. We’re calling it Sweet Peach Georgia, which has been our nickname for her. The collection is going to be adjustable, to accommodate IVs and hospital cords if a child is sick.
As a thank you to the team here at Boston Children’s Hospital, we’re donating a portion of the sales to their cardiac research program. I know Georgia was given to me for a reason, and while we are still figuring out what we’re going to do to change the world together, we’re starting with this.
Like any family, we have our good days and our bad days. But the most important thing Georgia has taught us is to live in the moment, especially those moments when I get to hold her.
I never thought I’d be able to handle having a sick baby, but Georgia has shown me how strong I truly am. My daughter is the essence of perseverance; she fights every single day. And as a family, we too will fight like soldiers every single day until she’s home with us.
