One father is boasting in the power of prayer after bringing home a perfectly healthy baby boy—one that doctors said had a 90% chance of dying shortly after birth.
In a viral Facebook post, Nick Schnarr explains that for the past nine months, his wife Brooklyn, has carried a “very sick baby boy.”
Several months into the pregnancy, doctors informed Nick and Brooklyn that their baby boy had something called hydrocephalus, otherwise known as “water on the brain.”
“We were referred to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, where we were told by several of the most highly regarded fetal specialists in the country that his condition was dire,” Nick explains. “The baby’s condition was ‘off the charts bad’. It was so extreme that the specialists stopped measuring and monitoring his fluid level because, at that point, it didn’t really matter. The MRI’s were sickening to look at.”
Nick and Brooklyn were told that there was more than a 90% chance that their baby would die shortly after birth, or have such severe cognitive impairments, that any quality of life would be hard to imagine.
So they made plans. The couple planned to give birth to their son, despite the harrowing outcome doctors expected for him. They “had detailed, awful, and emotional discussions,” about how to sustain his life when he arrived, and for how long they would do so before letting the baby “pass peacefully.”
After relocating to a hotel in Cincinnati to be close to the hospital for labor, the day finally came. On July 8, 2016, Brooklyn went into labor. With Nick by her side, they had final conversations about the use of breathing tubes and letting the baby “go to heaven,” before doctors wheeled Brooklyn in for a C-section.
“Guess what?” Nick writes. “The baby came out crying – which was the sweetest sound I ever heard.”
The couple named their son Charlie, and not only did he come out crying, he came out thriving. After just eight days in the NICU, Charlie, Nick, and Brooklyn went home together.
“He’s seems to be a normal, beautiful baby doing all the things that babies do,” Nick writes. “He has mild ventricular enlargement, but we can deal with that with checkups.”