Brittany: Dealing with Disbelief

After 17-year-old Brittany O’Daniel finally worked up the courage to tell her family that she was pregnant, a full month after she herself had found out, she was surprised and hurt when they refused to believe her.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” her father, Charlie O’Daniel, said one evening as he headed out for dinner.

Brittany stopped him and began listing her own lengthy dinner order, including chocolate ice cream. Her appetite had already taken off, and creamy, cool chocolate was the food she would crave the most throughout the pregnancy.

“Why are you eating so much?” Charlie asked.

“Because I’m feeding two,” the young girl said.

“Yeah, right,” Charlie answered, and left the house.

Even after Charlie told the rest of the family later, no one believed him.

A month earlier, in December, Brittany had gone to the doctor for a routine checkup and learned that she was pregnant. She cried in the doctor’s office, scared and happy at the same time. Over the next few weeks, she shared her news with only her friends, too afraid to tell her family.

Only Brittany’s grandmother, Sara, believed she was pregnant. Sara had said she had known two weeks before even Brittany had found out about it. Brittany never learned how her grandmother had guessed her secret. She speculated that it was some kind of extrasensory phenomenon, or that Sara, like some wise character in a movie, could simply look at her granddaughter’s face and tell.

“My cat’s going to have kittens soon,” Sara said to Brittany one day, giving Brittany a chance to tell her, and the two finally began to talk openly about Brittany’s status.

Only after Brittany began going to her OB/GYN appointments did the rest of her family start to believe her.

Megan: Battles in the Classroom

Megan Lambert, 17, completed her first three years of high school at three different locations, transferring first from Williams to Cummings and then from Cummings to Graham High School. When she began school at Graham, she was four months pregnant and finding it difficult to balance her homework and school projects with her new life as a 15-year-old wife and homemaker. She and her husband Jonathan had just moved into their first house together in June, and she was adapting to the schedule of cleaning the house, taking care of herself, getting sleep at night and finding time to finish her schoolwork.

As the mood swings from her pregnancy grew worse and worse, Megan found herself clashing with her teachers and spending time in detention. Most of her teachers did not know that she was pregnant, and some would punish her for the bouts of morning sickness that they most likely assumed were faked cases of food poisoning or stomach virus - the kinds of imaginary illnesses that a non-pregnant teen might feign to miss class.

“Megan, if you’re sick, you don’t need to come to school,” a teacher said to one day.

“Well, I need to come to school to get my diploma,” she replied.

Another day, after Megan had finished her class work and begun the homework for another teacher’s class, her instructor approached her, irritated.

“Megan,” he said, “You can’t do that now. You need to do my work.”

“I’ve already finished your work,” Megan replied, frustrated and growing angry. “What do you want me to do?”

“You need to get out in the hallway,” the teacher said.

Megan, hormones taking over, threw her book at the wall across the room and walked out.

“You can suspend me if you want to,” she said as she left.

Although Megan wasn’t suspended that day, she was suspended later, when she didn’t have a pen and paper in class one day.

Megan was suspended for a day after that: her first and last suspension ever, since she would drop out of high school a few months later.

Ashleigh: A Late Arrival

“Be here before 9,” was what the staff at Alamance Regional Medical Center told 15-year-old Ashleigh Graham. At one week and three days overdue, Ashleigh didn’t think she was ever going to have her baby. Attempting to bring on the belated labor, the girl had been jumping, skipping and hopping for days, trying to coax her baby to come out.

So, with her mother and her best friend at her side, Ashleigh went to the hospital on a Tuesday night in March to have labor induced. At Alamance Regional, a nurse started the induction, and by Wednesday morning, Ashleigh had dilated one centimeter.

When Ashleigh began to feel contractions, she received an epidural and IV medication to minimize her labor pain. But because Ashleigh is anemic, she was extremely hot and slightly dehydrated.

“Eat this,” nurses kept saying, holding ice to Ashleigh’s lips. “Eat this ice.”

Without warning, the baby’s heart rate began to drop. Hospital staff placed an oxygen mask over Ashleigh’s face, then turned her on her side to try to bring the heart rate back up. The rate picked up, dropped and then picked up again.

“Oh my God,” Ashleigh repeated from inside her oxygen mask, sweating and breathing hard. “What’s going on?”

None of the nurses or doctors working around Ashleigh told her what was happening, pushing her mother out of the way and turning Ashleigh over and back again in response to the frantic beeping sounds coming from the infant heart-rate monitor.

“Take your jewelry off,” a nurse told Ashleigh. “We might have to do a C-section.”

Finally, the doctors determined the cause of the fluctuating heart rate: the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. After determining that a C-section was no longer necessary, Ashleigh’s obstetrician said to push.

After the long extra week of waiting, the heart-rate scares and near-C-section, hearing her baby cry in the delivery room for the first time hit Ashleigh hard. She started crying, choking out a duet of tears with her screaming baby, then continued to cry as a nurse placed Neveah, her newborn baby girl, on her stomach.

Kaya: Losing a Miracle

Looking back on it, high school senior Kaya Lambert now knows that she was suffering from depression throughout much of her pregnancy. The young girl did not fully realize that she was dealing with depression until after she had given birth to her son Jaquill. It was then that her postpartum depression began to hit her with full force.

Kaya had been pregnant at the same time as her grandmother’s dog, who gave birth to seven puppies while Kaya was still pregnant with Jaquill. Only one of the seven puppies survived; Kaya named it Miracle. Forming a unique attachment to the pup, Kaya would feed Miracle from a bottle every four hours and wake with the puppy in the middle of the night - something she would do later for her son.

The stress of caring for Miracle would often make Kaya break down and cry, and it wasn’t just caring for the puppy that drove Kaya to tears - it seemed like every little thing would make her eyes start to well up.

As her due date approached, Kaya knew she would have to give up her beloved dog Miracle. When she finally gave the dog away, she missed it terribly, and had a difficult time adjusting to its absence in the weeks that followed.

After she gave birth to Jaquill, little things continued to set Kaya off, and she finally realized that she was suffering from postpartum depression when she found that, even with a new baby in her life, she was continuing to mourn for Miracle nearly all the time.

“I miss my dog,” Kaya told her grandmother. “And how can I be thinking about a dog when I just had a baby?”

Alesia and Kaya’s boyfriend, Johnny Lewis, could see that she needed help. She was crying almost every day, and often felt exhausted and fatigued. So together, the three began the process of recovery, setting out to find a new miracle for the young teen mother.

Reporter: Alyse Knorr - 08/29/07