preemie-l Intro of the Murphy Family

murphy@TeleCheck.com
Sat, 08 Jun 96 04:55:18 -0500 

Hello,

I am very excited about finding this group and am looking forward to learning 
from the experiences of others and sharing our experiences.

The Murphy family is comprised of myself, Chris Murphy, Michelle my wife, 
Michael Wayne Murphy II (our lovely terrible 2 1/2 year old), and the very 
beautiful and very early Hope Victoria Murphy.  We live in Pasadena, Texas 
(near Houston.)

We were very excited to find out that Michelle was carrying twins.  We were 
told from the start that about 50% of all twin births were premature so we 
began preparing ourselves early, but we were in no way prepared at just 25  
weeks (Due Date: April 18, 1996).  Michelle's water broke unexpectedly on the 
night of Jan 9, 1996, and we rushed to our local hospital and then we were 
transfered to Texas Women's Hospital.  The doctor rushed in and explained that 
he was going to try and stop the birth and then immediately changed his mind 
and it was off to the delivery room.  Faith Elizabeth Murphy was born first at 
1lb. 4oz. then came Hope Victoria weighing in at 1lb. 15oz.  They were 
identical twins, but Hope was much larger due to twin-to-twin transfusion.  
Although Faith was the smaller of the two, she at first seemed to be doing the 
best.  Hope was very sick and had severe problems with her blodd pressure and 
circulation.  After 7 days Hope started getting somewhat better, but Faith 
took a turn for the worst.  One of her lungs collapsed and she passed away on 
Jan 19, 1996 at approx. 11:00 pm.  If I tried to document all of the 
complications that occured this would be one huge message, so to shorten 
things up:

Hope is now home.  She was released to us in April and came home on oxygen and 
an apnea monitor.  She has done very well, as a matter of fact, she was 
finally taken off of the oxygen just this Thursday!  We are very excited about 
it, especially now that we can look at her face without seeing the tubes.  
Hopefully, with no problems, she will loose the apnea machine in a few weeks.  
Michelle is very eager for this, but I'm afraid I've become kind of dependent 
on the obnoxious machine.  Hope is I guess about 2 months old adjusted and is 
weighing about 7lb. 3oz.

I and Michelee are looking very forward to sharing information here.  There is 
so much that I don't even know were to start.  Michelle and I are probably 
considered young parents (we are both 25), and we want to be the best parents 
we can.  I think sharing information with others is probably going to help us 
more than anything else we've been doing up to this point.

Looking forward to talking,
The Murphy's
Chris, Michelle, Michael, and baby Hope (Michael (2 yrs. old) calls her the 
baby "Shister").

-- 
Chris Murphy                            |  e-mail: murphy@TeleCheck.com
Applications Supervisor                 |  Dialer Data Processing
TeleCheck Services International, Inc.  |  Consumer Systems 

... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer,
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existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god
coefficient.  (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism
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