Brandon Freer and his wife Christine spent their honeymoon in the Caribbean in September 2004. Unbeknownst to the newlyweds, Hurricane Ivan was on its way and would soon make landfall. The two survived the storm unscathed and when they returned to the States Christine discovered she was pregnant. The couple eagerly awaited the birth of their first child, once again unaware that another crisis was headed their way.
Caught Unawares
Christine’s pregnancy was barely showing when she started spotting at around 24 weeks. She didn’t feel well but she experienced only mild discomfort so she figured it was typical. Everything changed, though, when Brandon woke up in the middle of the night to his wife’s cries of pain. He drove her to the hospital and at that time he didn’t feel scared.
“I was totally confused,” Brandon admitted. “Although she was bleeding and in pain, my wife didn’t let on just how severe the situation really was.”
Brandon recalls that during the drive to the ER he thought about work and made sure to brake and wait patiently at every single stoplight. When Christine was admitted to the hospital she asked him to call both sets of parents. He made the calls and went in search of the coffee machine. It wasn’t until he came back into the waiting room that the gravity of the situation hit him.
“It was like I was in a whirlwind of nurses with clipboards asking me to sign forms,” Brandon said. “I was told that Christine needed an emergency C-section.”
Christine’s doctor sat Brandon down to deliver the bad news. The baby’s heart rate was low and consistently dropping.
“I was in total shock,” Brandon said. “They wheeled Christine into the operating room and I barely even had time to hold her hand. I didn’t know if she or the baby would survive.”
The hospital staff stopped Brandon at the door to the OR and told him he would have to remain in the waiting room. He and Christine lived in Los Angeles, far away from the rest of his family. For the next several hours Brandon sat in the waiting room alone, watching the seconds slowly tick by on the clock and anxiously awaiting news about his wife and his child.
The First Photo
When Christine’s doctor emerged from the operating room the first words out of Brandon’s mouth were “Is my wife alive?” The doctor told him that Christine was recovering and then slid a photo across the table to Brandon.
“I didn’t even know what I was looking at,” Brandon said. “Then I realized it was a baby with translucent skin and its eyes fused shut. It was covered in tubes and wires.”
It took a moment, but eventually Brandon realized he was looking at the very first photo of his newborn son.
“You have expectations your whole life of what your first glimpse of your baby will be like,” Brandon said. “What I saw was not what I had envisioned.”
The doctor wanted to be sure Brandon understood just what steep risks his newborn son was facing. He informed Brandon that the baby had an 18-20% chance of survival during the first 24 hours. If he did make it through the day, the baby would face a long list of potential complications.
“It was a barrage of things no parent ever wants to hear,” Brandon recalled. “Christine and I thought we had more time before the baby would arrive, but we didn’t.”
An hour or two later Brandon was able to visit Christine. When she woke up from the anesthesia the first words out of her mouth were “Is the baby alive?” Brandon assured her the baby had made it through.
He would soon get the chance to see his tiny son in person for the first time.
Brandon walked into the NICU in the wee hours that February morning utterly terrified. The somber atmosphere was oppressive and the sound of the airlock door opening and closing reminded him of a scene from a science fiction movie. There were two other sets of parents in the NICU with him, but he didn’t dare make eye contact for fear of what he might see there.
Baby Brandon would spend the first 96 days of his life in three different hospitals in California. Brandon recalls what it was like seeing parents crying in the hallway because their child had passed.
“Every day I would ask myself the same question,” Brandon said. “Is this the day he is going to die?”
The hardest moments came in the maternity ward, when Brandon and Christine saw other moms walking with their newborn babies in their arms. The other new parents received gifts of balloons and teddy bears, but it was a much graver occasion for the Freers.
“Christine decided she wanted to stand up and look through the window into the NICU if the blinds were open,” Brandon said. “I can count on one hand how many times I have seen my wife cry. As a nurse she dealt with death and dying all day long and nothing ever bothered her. She barely saw the baby before she slumped back down in the wheelchair, crying, and mumbled ‘What did I do wrong?’”
Brandon rushed to assure his wife there was nothing she could have done differently. The doctors had no idea why their baby had been born premature.
Baby Brandon weighed a mere 1 lb., 4 oz. He received several blood transfusions, had to be on oxygen, his kidneys and liver were malfunctioning, and he received bilirubin treatments. He had a PDA ligation surgery to close a hole in this heart because the doctors weren’t able to close it using medicine.
Baby Brandon in the NICU.
The most frightening moment came in the midst of Baby Brandon’s long list of complications. His oxygen levels were dropping and doctors detected a murmur in his abdomen. The baby had an umbilical arteriovenous malformation (AVM), which meant that an artery was connecting directly to a vein, instead of through a network of capillaries. The baby’s body wasn’t getting the oxygen he needed. At around only a week old, Baby Brandon underwent surgery to have the artery clamped so blood flow would return to normal.
When Baby Brandon arrived home after more than three months in the hospital he weighed only 4 ½ lbs. He had been diagnosed with chronic lung disease and had to be on oxygen. For the next year Brandon and Christine attended numerous doctor appointments and occupational therapy sessions to keep an eye on their baby’s health and monitor his development.
The Second Time Around
For two years the Freers discussed the possibility of having a second child. After what they had been through, they were not eager to jump into another possibly life-threatening situation. Because there had not been an underlying medical condition as the cause of Baby Brandon’s premature birth, doctors told the couple they could attempt to conceive again without too many reservations.
The couple spent the next year on fertility treatments, but with no luck. There didn’t seem to be any medical issues preventing conception and the couple did not want to opt for IVF. Almost as soon as they gave up trying, Christine discovered she was pregnant for a second time.
“We were definitely nervous,” Brandon said. “We just hoped everything would be OK.”
Christine was on instant bed rest and her second pregnancy was considered at-risk. At 29 weeks she began bleeding. She was admitted to the hospital and even a week later had not stopped bleeding.
“We were just happy she had passed the 24-week mark,” Brandon said. “We knew that every day she remained pregnant increased the survival odds for the baby, so we tried to hold off as long as we could.”
Eventually the time came when the risk to Christine’s health was too great and the baby had to be born via another emergency C-section.
“After Christine came out of surgery the only thing she wanted to know was how much the baby weighed,” Brandon said. “When I told her he weighed three pounds she said ‘Thank God’ and fell asleep.”
Justin in the NICU.
The couple’s second son, whom they named Justin, spent six weeks in the NICU. He didn’t tolerate food well and struggled with stomach issues during his first days of life. He too had a hole in his heart that did not close shortly after birth, but doctors were able to correct the problem with medicine rather than having to resort to surgery. As a toddler Justin developed several cases of severe pneumonia and had to be hospitalized.
From the Hospital to Hollywood
Brandon is a videographer and wanted to share his family’s story of surviving premature birth twice with the world so he set to work on a film script. The script is titled 18%, after the odds of survival his first son was given in the hospital. He has submitted the script to numerous film festivals and it was nominated for Best Dramatic Scene and Best New Writer from Action on Film in Los Angeles.
Justin grew up hearing about his brother’s experiences in the NICU and knew his father was working on a script for a movie. One day he asked his father, “Daddy, don’t you want to make a movie about me, too?”
“I realized we had four more years of photos and videos of our son Brandon than we did of Justin,” Brandon said. He then worked for three days straight to make a video for his youngest son.
Volunteering for the Cause
The Freers recently moved from southern California to Hampton Roads, Virginia. Brandon’s brother, Brian, is the publisher of The Health Journal in Williamsburg and is active with the Williamsburg Signature Chefs Auction. After what Brandon went through with his two preemie sons, Brian invited his brother to join him as a volunteer for the annual March of Dimes fundraiser.
“I had seen billboards on the highway for the March of Dimes, but I never made the connection to my own situation with my sons,” Brandon said.
“Somewhere in this country, at any moment, people are going through what we went through,” he continued. “It is a lonely, isolated feeling, but I want other parents to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I want to share my story with other parents and let them know they are not alone.”
(For a sample of Brandon’s videography handiwork, click here to view a snippet of the video that will debut at the 2015 Williamsburg Signature Chefs Auction on November 1.)
Although a decade has passed since his first son was born, it only takes one trigger, perhaps a sound or a smell, to put Brandon right back in that terrifying time in his life. He still gets up in the middle of the night sometimes to watch his sleeping sons and assure himself they are alright.
“My first son has a really outgoing personality,” Brandon said. “He is also very compassionate. He is the Brandon I wasn’t.”
About his second son, Justin, Brandon said, “He is very reserved and shy, but now that he is getting a little bit older he is more outgoing. He is such a funny little character.”
Some days Brandon still has trouble wrapping his mind around all that his family went through. He and Christine didn’t have the traditional pregnancy experiences. There were no baby showers and he never got to see his wife’s belly grow bigger and bigger. “There is a part of me that feels like the stork just dropped off two miracles,” he said.
The Freer family.
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