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Your Healthy Family: Pueblo West family to celebrate first Mother’s Day with miracle baby

Posted at 12:29 PM, May 10, 2019
and last updated 2023-02-23 11:30:29-05

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COLORADO SPRINGS – In this Your Healthy Family, we are continuing Lindsey and Zack Emerson’s story of how they became new parents this year.  As Lindsey gets ready to celebrate her first Mother’s Day, it will certainly be a special day because of all she went through – an emergency surgery, 33 days in the hospital, and weeks more on bed rest at home – to bring son Linkin into the world.

Dr. Laura Klein was one of the many doctors, nurses, and staff at UCHealth Memorial Hospital Central’s Women’s Pavilion that helped to save little Linkin when Lindsey was at risk of going into labor at 21 weeks, far too early for Linkin to survive.

Dr. Klein says, “Lindsay and Zack had a lot of family support and a lot of people pulling for them and they were willing to do anything to keep this baby.”

Lindsey says it was that strong support from family and friends, along with the best medical care available, that helped her make it through her time in the hospital after Dr. Klein performed an emergency cerclage – a cervical stitch procedure designed to prevent preterm birth – that saved the pregnancy.

Lindsey recalls, “Tons of support from my husband and my family.  Pretty much every day I had at least two or three visitors. We celebrated Thanksgiving here (at the hospital). We all went down to the cafeteria and had turkey and stuffing and all the good stuff.”
Lindsey says she also passed the time by keeping a journal. “My mom had this great idea to write in a journal everything that happened.  We wrote on a daily basis when nurses would come in and check on us or take my vitals or Linkin’s heartbeat. I wrote down my moods if I had a rough day, or a good day … I mean everything is in there.”

After 33 days of hospitalization, Lindsey’s condition stabilized enough that she was able to go home to continue bed rest.  With more support from their husband Zack and her family, she was able to make it to 34 weeks. In February of 2019, her water broke and she went into labor.

Dr. Klein happened to be on duty and was able to be the one to remove Lindsey’s cerclage and help bring Linkin into the world, something Lindsey says was very special for her.  “Dr. Klein was able to deliver him, which in my eyes is pretty awesome because she was the one who saved him initially, and she’s the reason why he’s here today. We definitely can’t thank her enough, and we can’t thank all the nurses in the Women’s Pavilion for the 33 days that I was here, and everyone in the NICU who cared for us for two weeks after he was born so Linkin could have a little bit of extra monitoring.”

It was a special delivery for Dr. Klein as well: “We really do get to know these patients well, because they have stayed in the hospital for several weeks so we really get to know them and their families.  We know how much they have invested in the pregnancy, and so all of our nurses and staff, we all love to see it when we get a healthy baby.”

Lindsey and Zack are both loving being new parents and will enjoy celebrating their first Mother’s Day, and more.  “It’s amazing,” says Lindsey. “It makes having him with us mean that much more. We knew that at some point we could have lost him.  We don’t take a single day for granted.”

Linkin’s journey into this life has also earned him a nickname says, Lindsey. “I was probably in the hospital for a week and my sister said, ‘I think we should call him the miracle man.  You didn’t expect him, you didn’t know what this pregnancy would entail. As time went on he was never compromised. Through the whole thing, he stayed healthy and had a strong heartbeat, and so we should call him a miracle man.’  That’s definitely what he is.”

Lindsey’s high-risk pregnancy is the type of case the staff at Memorial deals with on a regular basis.  Dr. Klein explains, “I’ve been doing this for a while, but cases never cease to surprise me. Every pregnancy is different and you can’t always predict how somebody’s going to respond to a procedure, and Lindsey did exceptionally well.”

To all the moms out there, no matter what type of pregnancy you went through to bring life into this world, happy Mother’s Day.

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