More than 24 years have passed since these photos were taken.  Technology seemed awesomely advanced back then...nearly a quarter of a century ago...and, by previous standards, I'm sure it was.

Here, though, is a little guy, who obviously has something going on...and it took them 8 years to find out what.

Early on, we heard a lot of terms, like, Hydrocephalus, and Polycystic Kidney Disease, and Trisomy 13, and Toxoplasmosis, developed intrauterinally, all of them possible diagnoses for this tiny baby with the strange anomalies.  Doctors from all over the hospital would come in to the Newborn Nursery, and ask where the baby was that had 'thus or so", and the nurse would immediately hush them, indicating that Mom was sitting right there.  Then there was whispering, and you could hear all kinds of medical jargon being thrown around, and you knew, they were talking about your baby.

Toxoplasmosis was the diagnosis that seemed to be 'the' diagnosis of the day.   Two doctors, after having examined the test results, concluded independently that most definitely, this is what David had.  They told us that David was completely congenitally blind, and that he would not survive 'neonate'.  I asked, "Neonate?  What does that mean?"  "...a month," the doctor replied.  David was 3 1/2 weeks old.

My heart sunk.  "Do you mean to tell me that I have less than a week left with my son?"  It was obvious that the doctor did not want to answer.  After a silence that is often called deafening, with a cracked voice, the doctor uttered a broken, "Yes, ma'am.  But, if he survives, he will live a suffering a debilitating life." 

I wanted to scream.  I had grown to love David so much, and the realization that I only had days left with him all but broke my heart.  I didn't want him to die.  But, the thought of him suffering a lift of pain, just because I didn't want to go through the agony of my child dying, seemed very selfish.  In that moment, it seemed less selfish to let him go, but how I did not want him to die!

David was such a tiny boy.  He had only weighed 3 pounds when he was born, full term.  As you can see in this photo, his arms were no bigger around than my fingers, and his legs no bigger than my thumb.  His head fit into the palm of my hand.  His head, the size of a 32 week baby, was disproportionately large to his body, only the size of a 28 week baby.

He never cried.  In fact, he never moved or made a sound.  He was too weak to swallow.  It took 36 hours for them to get his little body to tolerate 1cc. of water.

His hands were folded down onto his wrists, and his feet turned in at a 90° angle in the middle.  His toes and fingers were webbed, his ears low set, and his face seemed to almost stop before it got to his chin.

Every day, though, when I would go in to visit David, I would read I Samuel, chapter 19 to him, about another little boy named David, who had a great big giant to conquer.  "With God's help," I would tell my boy, "he did!  And, so will you, David!  God is going to help you...and me...and together, we're going to conquer this nasty old giant!"

One time, when I was sitting like this, talking to David, and singing to him, I felt eyes peering down upon me on the back of my neck.  I looked up to see 7 nurses gathered around, listening to my stories and my songs.  "Can I help you?...is everything...okay???" I asked them.  They started asking me questions.  It was obvious that they were, in a round about way, trying to find something out, without coming right out and asking. 

"What have the doctors told you? 

Have the doctors said anything to you about David? 

What do you know about your son?" 

Those kinds of questions.

Finally, one of the nurses just blurted out:  "Oohh, just go ahead and ask her!"

"Ask me what?"

"You don't think that this baby is okay, do you?  Like, you don't think that you are going to take this baby home in a few days, and raise him, and that he's going to be like your other children, do you?  You do understand that this baby is different!...that this baby is NOT going to grow up like other children!  This is NOT a normal baby....do you understand that????"

"Welllll....," I pondered, "I don't know what I think.  I don't know if this baby is going to grow up and live longer than I do, or if he is going to live another day...or even another hour...or even take another breath.  But, I do know that he's mine, and I love him....and however long he lives, whether it's one more minute, or one more hour, or another day, or for the rest of my life...I'm gonna love him."

The nurses breathed a sigh of relief.  "You just seemed so at peace....TOO at peace!...like, you were in denial!  And we were worried about you, that you just didn't 'get' it!"

I smiled.  "I 'get' it.  I don't know why I have peace...I'm just not worried.  There's lots of people praying for me, I guess.  But, I'm okay.  Okay?"  They smiled.  "Okay.."

David had a lot of 'nurse mommies'.  Every shift, there were at least 2 nurses vying for his chart.  Those nurses taught me everything:  How to hold him.  How to bathe him.  How to wash his hair, change his diaper.  Very often, I was too scared to hold him or to try whatever it was they wanted me to do, and they would have to say, "He's YOUR baby....HERE!" and plop him into my hands.  Imagine...being scared of this little thing...but I was. 

In these last 2 pictures, he's 8 days old, wearing Smurf Doll Clothes.  He's wearing 3 t-shirts under the Smurf shirt, just to keep his body temperature up.  BTW...Cabbage Patch doll clothes were waaayyy TOO BIG for him!  This is a little Smurf Tennis Outfit.  He had a Smurf Jogging Outfit too.  I bought his little blue booties at Toys-R-Us.  They fit a 12" doll.

Three weeks later, the doctors told us David had Toxoplasmosis, and that he had contracted it intrauterinally because I had been around cats, or had eaten bad meat.  Well, I rememered one time, when I was about 3 months pregnant, Rafy and I had gone out to a restaurant to eat, and I had ordered a ground steak, and it was bad.  I ate half of it before I said anything.  On this day, in front of that doctor, I was condemning myself for eating that meat.  But, perhaps it had happened when I pet the neighbor's cat when I was 6 months pregnant.  On that day I cursed my love of cats, and the things I had done that had done this to my child.  I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.  I thought, "Let ME die...not my baby!!"

My head swirled with condemnation.  "You couldn't have known," the doctor said.  Maybe not, but I did this to him...and I should have to be the one to pay for the mistake...not this baby.

Rafy called a friend of ours, Jim, who happened to be a pastor, and we went to his office to talk and pray.  The pastor listened with compassion and tenderness.  I told him what the doctor had said, and poured out accusations of self-condemnation.  The pastor did not reproach; he just listened...kept asking probing questions, and let me talk.

I was absolutely filled with agony.  "I just don't know how to pray!!  I don't want my baby to die!  But I don't want him to live a life of pain either!!  I just cannot reconcile how to pray!!!!"

Jim's next words seemed to resonate the very heart of God.  "You don't have to,  Julie.  God already has.  David's life is in HIS hands....it always has been.  God could have stopped that disease from harming him, but He didn't do it, for a reason, so that He could be glorified."  Then he read to us out of John, chapter 9, about the man born blind, so that God could be glorified. 

The truth of the words presented to us that day have never left me.  God did not make David this way in spite of His Love for him, but because of His Love for him...and for us.  David's life is held in the very heart of God, and God alone will decide when He will require it back.

The Scriptures say that we will know the truth, and that the truth will set us free.  That is so very very true.  I was set free.  Even if I had inadvertantly caused this to happen to David, God had let it happen, for His ultimate glory.

Later that evening, I arrived back to the hospital, and found a strange doctor, one I hadn't seen before, standing at David's bedside.  He introduced himself, saying that he was the head of the Infectious Disease Team.  "Your baby does not have Toxoplasmosis.  Those doctors read the test results wrong."  I was stunned.  "He's not near bad enough to have Toxoplasmois." 

He went on to explain how the test results should have been read, and why the other two doctors had read them incorrectly, and come up with a wrong diagnosis.  "Sooo, David doesn't have toxoplasmosis?  I didn't do this to him?!"  My heart was racing.

The doctor looked at me squarely.  "Even if he were to have contracted Toxoplasmosis, you wouldn't have done this to him.  It would have been a protozoan that did this to him, not you."

"They said he's completely congenitally blind.  Is he blind?"

"That, I don't know.  You'll need to get an eye doctor in here for that.  But he doesn't have toxoplasmosis."  He turned and left, without even a goodbye.

I stood there by David's bed, looking at this almost catatonic baby, unmoving, and unresponsive.  I looked up to see one of David's nurse mommies across the room, watching the encounter between me and the doctor who had just left.  Normally a stern woman, the look on her face this night was one of choking back tears.

"What do I do now?" I asked her.  I had just come to terms with him dying in the next few days, and gone through enormous agony over what I thought I had done to him, and none of it was true.  I stood there, numb.

"You go home, and you get some sleep."  I started crying, and felt arms around me as I buried my head in someone's shoulder, and wept.  "You go call your husband, and tell him what the doctor said, and you go home."

And I did.  But not before I called my mom and told her.  We had more questions than answers, but there was nothing to do but to take the next step.  You walk across the room, you get a drink, you fix dinner, and you go to sleep.  And you wake up the next day, and do it all over again.

And all the while, your baby lay sleeping, in an isolette, and you know God is watching over him.  You are holding your baby with open palms, not knowing if he will breathe another minute, or another day...but you love him.

If you have a triploidy mosaic baby, or have recently found out that you are about to have a baby with this disorder, please join our Mosaic_Triploidy support group on Yahoo.