No expecting mother wants to hear the doctor say that there’s something wrong with her baby, but unfortunately there are many common labor complications, including:
- Umbilical cord issues,
- Perineal lacerations,
- Abnormal heart rate,
- Amniotic cavity issues.
Here’s Louise Adam’s incredible story of how she kept her son alive after her water broke at only 22 weeks.
Despite the tragic news, Adams and her husband Jakk weren’t
ready to give up on their expectant son and decided to start researching
what they could do on their own. “All they could do is monitor me in hospital waiting for the inevitable miscarriage, which they said would happen in days,” Adams told Daily Mail. “But I could feel Joseph kicking. I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing to save him.”
Louise and Jakk found out that in other countries, women were advised to drink seven pints of water a day if their water broke early in order to replenish the lost amniotic fluid.
“The more the mother drinks the more the baby drinks and urinates,” Louise said, explaining that increasing her fluid intake would make a significant difference. Louise spent six days in the hospital and then went home where she adamantly drank the recommended amount of water daily for the next 13 weeks.
She shut herself off from the world and did everything she could to keep her baby alive from drinking extra water to consuming cranberry juice and raw cloves of garlic to fight off infection.
Considering there had been a lack of research on Louise’s strategy, doctors and midwives were skeptical her baby still had a fighting chance. However, her baby continued to grow.
Louise was somewhat relieved when she hit the 24 weeks milestone, knowing that now her baby had more of a chance of survival if he was born.
“Once past 24 weeks doctors finally gave me steroids to mature Joseph’s lungs and antibiotics to prevent infection,” Louise told Daily Mail.
All of her hard work and determination paid off as Louise delivered her baby at the Royal Stoke University Hospital via c-section with Joseph weighing a healthy 5 lb 10 oz.
Just three months after being told their baby wouldn’t survive, Louise and Jakk welcomed a healthy real-life water baby into the world.
“When we heard him crying his eyes out, we were overjoyed,” Louise recalled to Daily Mail. “He was absolutely perfect and did so well, he came home after just a week.”
Joseph is now six months old and as healthy as any other baby. Louise’s incredible story has been an inspiration for other mothers, giving hope to women in a similar predicament and providing a lesser known plan of action.
A charity that supports women who suffer from PPROM (Preterm Premature Rupture of Membranes), Little Heartbeats, backs up Louise’s approach of replenishing her body by increasing water consumption.
