SAVING
THE BABY

Topics: Birth; Healing; Miracles; Prayer; Supernatural Occurrences

Reference: Isaiah 9:6–7

I was nearly sixteen weeks into pregnancy when my water broke. The doctor prescribed bed rest and instructed me to go to the emergency room when the miscarriage began. I stayed in bed for two weeks, praying for a miracle, but it was clear the pregnancy was slowly coming to an end.

The miscarriage was partially complete before we left for the hospital. The seasoned ER doctor who saw us mumbled to a nurse to get a fetal heart monitor on me and then dashed off to the next patient.

The nurse returned with the monitor and began searching my abdomen for signs of life. She tried from every angle until the monitor was as low as it would go. Nothing. Then, suddenly, there was the unmistakable steady thumping of a tiny heart. I stared at my husband in disbelief. How much longer could the baby survive if there was no fluid in the sac?

The nurse hastily examined what I had lost at home. “Massive blood clots,” she told us as she quickly went in search of the doctor. My husband and I remained silent, not sure whether or not to be hopeful.

An obstetrician declared after his examination that we had a live baby who needed to be saved. He checked me into the hospital. The next day an ultrasound revealed perfect uterine conditions. I had plenty of fluid, a well-placed placenta, and an active eighteen-week-old baby. My doctor tried unsuccessfully to explain how several fist-sized blood clots could have escaped the sac along with large amounts of fluid and yet keep the pregnancy intact.

I went home from the hospital on Mother’s Day, 1997. On October 21, 1997, my husband and I made another midnight run to the hospital, getting there just in time for our full-term son’s marvelous birth. We named him Josiah, which means “Jehovah heals.”

—Renee Duka, adapted from Pentecostal Evangel (October 15, 2000)