A 21-ounce ‘Miracle’
Published: July 24, 2005
No one expected Da’Janique to cry when she was born. Her lungs, the doctors said, would be too weak.
But the premature baby girl nicknamed “Miracle,” weighing in at 1 pound, 5 ounces, belted out her first sobs almost immediately. As her mother, Nakarsha Whyte of Ocala, said recently, Da’Janique has always done things her own way.
“I was happy she was doing so well,” Whyte recalled. “At the same time, though, I wish she could have waited.”
Da’Janique Amarya “Miracle” Pringle was born 16 weeks premature on Oct. 22 at Shands at UF. She arrived home in Ocala Tuesday, marking the end of her nearly nine-month struggle in the Shands Neonatal Intensive Care Unit battling chronic lung disease, brittle bones, pneumonia and other complications.
“She’s a fighter,” Whyte said as she helped Da’Janique sit upright in her lap. “I would have to say I am blessed, because there were a lot worse situations that families were going through - and some babies that didn’t make it.”
But the trailing white wires from her heart monitor and the oxygen tubes taped to either side of her head bespoke the trials she has already weathered and the careful monitoring she will require for months, even years, to come.
Trouble begins
A 21-year-old single mother, Nakarsha Whyte said she never even became sick in the months before giving birth to her son, Cameron, now 6. When she became pregnant with Da’Janique, however, things started going wrong in the first two months, starting with bleeding and blackouts.
Her obstetrician in Ocala diagnosed her with placenta previa, a condition in which the placenta implants itself in the lower part of the uterus and blocks the opening to the birth canal.
Whyte’s doctor prescribed light bed rest and soon referred her for weekly visits to a clinic for high-risk pregnancies at Shands. Doctors there performed an ultrasound that revealed a partial placenta abruption, meaning that the placenta had partially peeled away from Whyte’s uterine wall. Placenta abruption can deprive the baby of oxygen, trigger bleeding for the mother and make a premature delivery four times more likely, according to a Mount Sinai School of Medicine study.
“I wasn’t thinking that the worst would happen,” Whyte recalled. “I thought I could wait until the end of the pregnancy and everything would be OK.”
At 25 weeks, however, Nakarsha’s water broke. She returned to Shands, where doctors determined that amniotic fluid no longer surrounded the baby - a risk factor for infection. The doctors admitted Whyte to Shands, placed her on complete bed rest and began a regimen of antibiotics as well as prenatal steroids to build up Da’Janique’s lungs. At that point, Whyte said, premature delivery seemed inevitable.
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