A mother's health impacts the health of her child.

Just as everyone does, I call my child my miracle. I was told at 34 that if I was not pregnant by 35, it was going to happen. So I quit worry about and raised everyone else's babies. At 38, I found out I was going to have a baby. I was so excited – but I was so worried that something would happen, I didn't by anything for the baby until my 9^th month.

I was already at 287 pounds (I only gained 13 lbs total) so I really had to watch everything I put into my mouth. I began eating lots of fruits and vegetables and lots of grape juice (the only thing I craved). I ate NO McDonald's or fast food of any kind and only allowed myself a sweet tea and baked potato on Fridays (if I had been good). I took my prenatal vitamins and drank my milk and LOTS of water (the only thing to curb the nausea). I was doing great, had lots of energy, and was really enjoying being pregnant.

Then a little storm called Katrina hit. Everything went crazy. I was at home alone watching the ceiling cave in and the trees fall all around me. Once the storm passed, I was stranded until someone could come cut trees. There was no electricity and no water; and it was so hot! 89 degrees at midnight is not the comfort we have become accustomed to. We had sleep on the tile floor just to keep cool. My young nephew (2 years old) and I began to dehydrate, so the family set out on a road trip. It took three days of rest and water for either of us to get better. The electricity came back on at our house after day six, so we went home.

At that time, I had two childcare centers across the street from each other with about 65 children total. One of the centers was totaled by two pine trees and flooding. We hurriedly removed contents to keep them from ruining all the while without power and water. Restaurants that cooked with gas gave food away. Our center cooked for parents to come pick up food for their children. This was a horrific ordeal and one that I personally never want to repeat and we were not in New Orleans or on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (we were one and a quarter hours up the highway from Gulfport, Mississippi in Hattiesburg).  We reopened only one building after 10 days and had to use every nook and cranny we could to house the children until other arrangements could be made.

Once power and water was restored, doctor's appointments resumed. I now had high blood pressure, hypertension, and had to do a non-stress test every week for the next 10 weeks. I'm so glad that I had been doing well with my diet because now I had to take 1500 mg of blood pressure meds everyday. I ended up working about 11 hrs a day because staff left due to the storm and never came back.  I still continued my nutritious eating plan and really stuck to it now.  I didn't want anything to happen to my little one.

At week 37, I ended beginning to swell and the doctor's induced that week. After 4 hours of hard labor that I don't remember because they kept me on pain meds because of the blood pressure, the doctor decided to do a C-section at 10:45pm. I had a beautiful, healthy, perfect little boy with a head full of brown hair that weighed in at 8lbs 7oz. He's eight now, still healthy and beautiful and not so perfect. But he's my miracle.

I have often wondered about those women in New Orleans who were pregnant. They were actually stranded and could not get out of the city as it flooded. We all saw pictures of people standing on the caved in bridges waiting for help and trying to stay on high ground. We've heard of so many people that were lost due to this storm. The city was out of commission for weeks. How would she have gotten emergency care for her and her baby? Water? Food of any kind, not necessarily nutritious? While we are pregnant we really don't like to think about bad stuff, do we?

This situation has me thinking about the women in Somalia. 1 in 10 Somali children die before their first birthday; 1 in 5 die before their 5^th birthday. Somalia has 250 trained doctors, 860 nurses, and 116 midwives for the whole population of 9 million. Only one-third of pregnant women have skilled health care at the birth and one-fourth only receive prenatal care one time with just 6% receiving prenatal care four times (PeaceWomen.org). This is the main reason the mortality rate is so high. Many have been driven from their homes to live in unsanitary conditions at refugee camps where they are not even able to get clean water to drink or bathe.

As a mother and a caring human being, I cannot even begin to imagine a situation as sad as Somalia.

PeaceWomen.org. (2010). Somalia: Pregnant Women Need More Care. Retrieved January 11, 2014 from http://www.peacewomen.org/news_article.php?id=2612&type=news