A Family Kept Whole

The Christiansens – husband and wife Adam and Katie, with son Cooper and daughter Parker – are a Nebraska family through and through. Katie is from West Point, Nebraska, a small town about 75 miles northwest of Omaha. She works at the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation. Her husband, Adam, is from Pender, Nebraska, which is a 20-minute drive north of West Point. The couple met in college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where Adam currently works as an academic navigator.

The couple knew before they were married that they wanted kids together. From the beginning, reaching their goal was an “emotional rollercoaster,” the Christiansens said. They tried for four years, going through in vitro fertilization (IVF), intrauterine insemination (IUI) and other treatments before having their daughter Parker in 2021.

When she had Parker, Katie significantly bled and ended up in the emergency department two days after giving birth. Due to COVID-19 restrictions at the time, Adam had to wait in the hospital parking lot with his newborn daughter while Katie received care.

When they were trying to have a second child, they lost two embryos in the thawing process. Finally, Katie became pregnant again, and she experienced more bleeding while carrying Cooper. Otherwise, Cooper looked great on ultrasounds leading up to his delivery date.

Things were going about as smoothly as they could for an expecting mother, until they weren’t.

“I need your surgical consent to save your wife’s life.”

Katie’s water broke on a Saturday, and she and her husband went to the hospital for delivery. Katie said her nurses were great at trying different positions to get baby Cooper to emerge. When it came time to push, Cooper’s blood pressure and oxygen levels were shifting, so the decision was made to vacuum him out. Once Cooper emerged, there was something wrong. He wasn’t moving.

“He was just limp at that point,” Adam said. “I was looking at the nurses, and they told me to give it time, but I had a feeling something wasn’t right.”

At that point, the delivery team was going to remove the placenta, so they told Adam to go with baby Cooper to the NICU and come back in a bit. He was there for about five minutes when he was urgently called back to Katie’s side. He was met right out of the elevator by one of the doctors, Rachel Anderson, DO, of Women’s Health Care Center of Williamsburg.

Katie was suffering from placenta accreta, a rare condition (affecting around 0.2% of pregnancies) where the placenta grows too deeply into the wall of the uterus, causing severe bleeding. The care team performed an emergency hysterectomy, which took almost four hours. She lost seven liters of blood and underwent five transfusions.

At the same time, Adam was told that his son had not received enough oxygen during the birth, resulting in hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). To treat HIE, the doctors use a cooling blanket on babies for about 72 hours, cooling their bodies and slowing their brain activity to prevent brain damage.

At this point, Adam was torn between his wife and his newborn son. It was a terrifying period for him; he was faced with the unthinkable idea that he might lose one, or both, of his loved ones.

“I was sitting there, researching what they were telling me about Cooper, and I didn’t really have any idea what was going to happen with him or with Katie,” Adam said. “You never expect your wife or your baby to be in that situation.”

A Letter from Cooper

Eventually, Adam went home for the night to be with his daughter, who was at her grandparent’s house and had no idea anything was wrong. He returned early the next morning, where Katie was still in the ICU but had woken up from surgery. He told her about everything that happened over the last 24 hours.

“It was kind of like a movie,” Katie said. “I woke up and was like ‘Where am I? What am I doing here?’ Not having my baby with me was really hard.”

One of the NICU nurses, Rachel Kreikemeier, came down with a picture of Cooper in the cooling blanket, “wrapped up like a little mummy,” the couple said. It came attached with a note, written by Rachel, in the voice of their newborn.

Katie ultimately went for four days without seeing Cooper and was discharged from the hospital almost a week after arriving.

“It was insanely emotional,” Katie said. “I was in a wheelchair connected to different things; I look back at pictures and it doesn’t even look like me. Then, the first time I see my baby, he’s in an incubator and I can’t hold him.”

Mikayla Schultz, RN, was the primary nurse assigned to Cooper. The Christiansens remember the feeling of relief well when she came down to Katie’s hospital room to tell them Cooper’s brain MRI was clear.

The couple recently took Cooper to a neurologist for a follow-up on his brain health. The doctor told them that the cooling blanket worked wonders for Cooper; scans showed no signs of any brain damage. The blanket needs to be applied within a few hours of birth to be effective.

“We love where we come from in rural Nebraska, but if we weren’t in Lincoln, Katie and Cooper might not have made it,” Adam said. “We were in the right place.”

Cooper continues to progress well, passing hearing tests and wearing a helmet to help with his skull development. Cooper is the “happiest, chillest baby,” in the words of his parents.

“We say that he must have known how he came into the world, because he has made everything so easy on us since then,” Katie said.

Super Cooper

Since her traumatic birth experience, Katie has struggled with balancing the urge to know everything that happened to her with the tremendous emotional and mental burden that comes with that knowledge. Reading back through her mom’s diary of that period and looking at her medical records have been difficult steps for her healing process.

“I don’t remember much, so most of what I know comes from Adam and our family,” she said. “It’s really hard, as a mom, not knowing exactly what happened to you and your child.”

Perinatal depression, which can occur for parents during or after pregnancy, affects one in seven women and one in 10 men, according to the Nebraska Perinatal Quality Improvement Collaborative. At Bryan, women are screened for mental health concerns throughout their maternal journey. Adam received a screening as well from the NICU, which he said was eye-opening.

Katie has now been in postpartum therapy for a while but struggled at first to recognize that she needed it or where to turn in the first place. Even coming back to Bryan Medical Center has been hard. Sometimes, talking about their experiences has been the hardest, but most necessary, part.

The family reunited with so many members of Cooper’s care team at the NICU reunion this summer. There, Schultz and baby Cooper shared a healing experience of reconnection.

“She held him, and he just melted into her,” Katie said. “He was comfortable with her; it was like he knew who she was from her time caring for him.”

One of their doctors, Todd Martin, MD, gave their son the nickname “Super Cooper.” For his first birthday, celebrating a year since potential tragedy turned into triumph, the Christiansens threw a “Super Cooper” party.

“My God, that kid has been through so much,” his mom said. “But he’s thriving now.”

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