The power of Prayer: Baby makes miraculous turnaround in 48 hours

This story was published as a three part blog series for "Testimony Thursday" at River of Life.

“At 16 weeks I found out she had a problem…”

Gabriella Leadens was getting ready for work when she got the call, her blood test had come back positive. There might be something wrong with her baby. Even now she can still recall her doctor trying to reassure her.

“I had a quad screen test, which was basically testing for spina bifida, and it came back positive. My doctor told me ‘a lot of these tests can be false positive.’ So I kept trying to tell myself that’s what it was," said Leadens. "After the call I was a mess. I was crying, and I called my husband, I was supposed to be at work in 20 minutes,” she added.

Gabriella didn’t make it to work. She didn’t sleep either. She couldn’t do anything but think of that ‘positive’ test looming over her baby.

“The next day I told my doctor, ‘I need an ultrasound tomorrow. I need to figure out what’s going on.’”

Gabriella and her husband Briggs Leadens got the ultrasound, it was the first time they heard the term gastroschisis; but it wouldn’t be the last.

“They looked her up and down and found out everything was good, besides the fact that she had gastroschisis," remembered Leadens, "They briefly told us what it was, they said, ‘there’s an opening in the abdominal wall,’ and then they said, “in the state of Minnesota you have up to 24 weeks to abort,’ and in that moment all I could think was, ‘Oh my god…’”

According to the CDC, “Gastroschisis is a birth defect of the abdominal (belly) wall. The baby's intestines are found outside of the baby's body, exiting through a hole beside the belly button. The hole can be small or large and sometimes other organs, such as the stomach and liver, can also be found outside of the baby's body.”

With just one word, the future of Briggs and Gabriella’s baby was suddenly rocky. That afternoon Gabriella says she was a mess.

“The whole ride home I was in the car losing it. Our parents came over, and they were trying to console us. And we really shouldn’t have, but we Googled ‘gastroschisis’ and saw all the horror stories… that was really bad. Then I decided to call my doctor and she set us up to meet a neonatal surgeon.”

After days of getting bad news, Gabriella and Briggs scheduled yet another appointment and made the trip to the University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital in Minneapolis.

“The surgeon put us at ease. I still thank God for getting us to the right people to find out more about this defect. We both walked out of that appointment with a sigh of relief. He [the surgeon] was sitting back in his chair like, ‘oh yeah, I see this all the time,’ so I was like, ‘okay, he seemed pretty cool about it, so it’s fine.’”

The Big Decision

Even though the surgeon had eased some of their worries, Briggs and Gabriella still had to decide whether they were going to continue the pregnancy, and they had less than 8 weeks.

“I never, ever thought I would be someone that would get an abortion. But I was so concerned about what her quality of life would be. It was so hard. Every day; it came up. Every single day," says Leadens, "My husband and I would talk about it, then I would go and talk to my mom because I didn’t know what to do and we would just sit there and cry.”

They were also praying about it every day, and thanks to their family members, their church was praying for them too.

“Penny, my mother-in-law, contacted Pastor Dave the day we found out and briefly told him what was happening. So he started praying, and told a prayer group and staff, so there were a bunch of people praying over us.”

After weeks of prayer, research, and talks with their loved ones, they decided to go through with the pregnancy.

“I’m really happy we went through with the pregnancy, I still look at her and then I look at Briggs and I’m like, ‘imagine if we didn't keep her. To think that we weren’t going to. And now she’s perfect, you couldn’t even tell that she had anything wrong with her,’” says Leadens.

Welcome to the NICU

“I got induced at 36 weeks. I had been going in to the U of M multiple times a week for tests to monitor her mobility, and she failed the test.”

Gabriella was induced at noon on January 23, Delaney was born around 7 a.m. on January 24, 2018, weighing in at a whopping five pounds, 10 ounces.

“When I had her, her intestines were literally outside. And they [the NICU team] basically caught her organs and put them in a sterile bag. I had like 15 people in the room, the whole NICU team was in the room. Once they got her stable and had everything in the bag, they let me see her. She was there for about 10 minutes, then they took her to the NICU, and that’s where the surgeon was waiting for her.”

Delaney’s surgeon put her intestines, appendix, stomach, ovary and fallopian tube into a bag, hung it over her body, and using gravity, they put Delaney’s organs back inside of her body. On the third day of her life, she went into the operating room and they closed her up.

An Unexpected Complication

Because of her condition, Delaney was getting her nutrition from a PICC line. After about a month, Gabriella noticed a strange lump forming on her daughter’s leg.

“It was a blood clot. It was so big, it took her surgeon two days to get it out... while this was happening they put a different PICC line in her arm, and she got another blood clot. That’s when they figured out she was allergic to the polyurethane. So we switched her to IV, but then she had to get poked every four days and she started running out of veins.”

Gabriella recalled those days with frustration. Adding that the entire time Delaney was being poked and prodded, she kept asking why they didn’t have anything other than polyurethane PICC lines.

“At this point we had been there for 30-40 days, so we had a care meeting to get everyone on the same page and the surgeon said Delaney would be there for another four to six more months… I was just like, ‘what?’ And he said, ‘I’ve been here for 25 years and I’ve never seen a child turn around fast, she’s already taken a long time, the end's not near for you guys. So I asked again, ‘are you sure you don’t have another type of PICC line?”

As luck would have it, a nurse practitioner sitting in on the meeting remembered the hospital getting a single silicon PICC line as a sample from a medical supply company.

The next day, the nurse practitioner got the new PICC line, but while she was inserting it, there was another complication: she couldn’t get it to go all the way in, Delaney needed another operation.

“Once the silicon line was in Delaney’s body accepted it. But she still wasn’t able to eat enough,” said Gabriella.

Do You Believe In Miracles?

“When it started getting to our 50 to 60 day mark in the NICU our surgeon started to get really negative, because Delaney couldn’t hold any milk down. She would get to five milliliters and throw up, so we’d have to stop feedings,” recalls Gabriella.

That’s when Briggs and Gabriella decided to bring in Pastor Dave and his wife Ann for a visit.

“They [Dave and Ann] had been texting me and praying for us the entire time, but they initially couldn’t come into the NICU because they’re really strict and you have to have your flu shots and they didn’t, so Ann said, ‘we’re praying for you and we hope to see you soon,’” said Gabriella.

Pastor Dave remembers the day they finally got to visit well, “We went to the hospital and it was so cool, we just felt the spirit of God praying healing into baby Delaney. The day before their doctor had said they would be there for a few more months, so Ann I prayed that Delaney would be healed soon, like within a week. We just prayed that in faith and it happened! It was crazy! It literally happened! It shocked everyone. It built their [Briggs and Gabriella] faith, it built our faith, it built everyone’s faith.”

During this week, while Dave and Ann were praying for a quick healing process, Gabriella and Briggs were also praying, for Delaney to finally keep her food down.

“One day Briggs was holding her before a feeding, and I looked at him and said, ‘we need to start praying over her food.’ So we huddled together and just prayed that this time she would just hold it down, and she did,” said Gabriella.

Then for the next feeding Delaney held down her food again. And the next. And the next. And the next.

Gabriella recalled that while it was amazing Delaney was eating, there was still one milestone left: infant driven feedings. Thankfully, they didn’t have to wait too long to reach it, “She ate and ate, and she kept crying after. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so I put the bottle up to her mouth and she was hungry, like starving. So I asked the nurse if we could give her more food. And that’s what they were looking for.”

Gabriella says it got to the point where she could eat more and more. Two days later, after 69 days in the hospital they we were discharged, Delaney could finally come home.

“She went from eating nothing, to eating 80 milliliters in only two days. It was crazy. It was super cool to see prayer work so fast. I have never seen prayer work so powerfully in my entire life.”

Delaney has been home ever since, Gabriella says she’s doing amazing, adding that you wouldn’t be able to tell she spent the first few months of her life inside of a hospital.

Briggs and Gabriella spent months going through an intense faith journey, but they walked through that journey hand in hand and came out of it with a healthy baby girl, and a stronger relationship with God, and each other.