I had been married for 3 years and was 25 years old when I had my first child. We had anticipated his arrival for 9 months and we couldn't be more happy that he was finally here. We felt very blessed, that even though the delivery was long, he had arrived safely and he was healthy, or so we thought.
I remember I felt so much happiness and joy holding my new baby. The time came for the nurse to come and to take him back to the nursery. When I handed him over, I looked down and there was blood on my sheets. I thought the blood was from me and that I had been the one bleeding. I lifted up the sheets and there wasn't any blood on me. I was troubled by this and looked up at the nurse who was holding and checking my baby. She had found that his PKU shot was still oozing blood from underneath the band-aide. I remember her joking that maybe the other nurse had poked him too hard for his PKU, she was kind of mean.
The next few days were a blur, the doctors decided that they needed to run a bunch of tests to figure out why he wouldn't stop bleeding. I remember a bunch of medical people coming into my room and asking me a bunch of questions like; Is there a history of a bleeding disorder in your family? No. Have you ever had any bleeding problems? Do you have a family history of hemophilia in your family? No.
When this question was asked I remember thinking, "hemo what?!!" Then I had remembered watching a movie about a little boy with hemophilia. The movie showed a scene where the boy was sledding down a hill, crashed and got hurt. I remember the mother mixing some medicine, that she had to give, by poking her son in his vein. When I was watching this part of the movie, I remember thinking, "Boy that would suck to have to deal with that!" Little did I know that, that would be something I would have to deal with later on in life...
Five days after my baby boy was born, he was diagnosed with severe hemophilia A.
