I
t had been a difficult pregnancy, marked by periodic bouts of heavy, unexplained bleeding. At 22 weeks and one day, Keely Harles began to have contractions and was rushed to Overland Park Regional Medical Center by her husband, Stan. The doctors did an ultrasound and gave the worst news a mother can hear.
“Hunter no longer had a heartbeat,” Harles said. “We lost him.”
She delivered her dead son, eight ounces and 18 weeks premature. They all waited for more bad news. Then something amazing happened. The contractions stopped.
Hunter’s twin brother, Hudson, was still alive.
EIGHT weeks earlier, Harles was driving home to Moran from Spirit Nation, the dance studio she owns and operates in Iola. She had moved to the area only a year before. Harles, a former soldier in the Army, is originally from New Mexico.
“We have the same tornadoes, but it’s not as green,” she joked.
They came this way because it was home for her husband. Stan had graduated from Marmaton Valley in 1996 and now works for BNSF Railway Company as a signal maintainer. The job still requires him to do a lot of traveling, but not as much as he had done while in the Marines or as a military contractor. Harles was done moving around and ready to settle down and raise her family. She had already had two sons; Tommy, now 9, and Justice, now one and a half. She expected her third pregnancy to go as smoothly as the first two had.
As Keely Harles made her way home in the darkness that night, a black cow wandered unseen onto the road and totaled her new car. She escaped without any injury, other than a little soreness, but she made an appointment for that Friday to get an ultrasound, just to be sure. That was when she found out she was having twins. They appeared normal and healthy.
“Everything looked great. They looked wonderful,” she said.
Two weeks later, Harles began hemorrhaging, bleeding badly. The doctors were sure she was losing the babies and told her to prepare herself, but the bleeding stopped. An ultrasound revealed nothing wrong. They sent her home. Then it happened again. And again.
“There was no reason for the bleeding,” she said. “They kept sending me home basically to lose the babies.”
AFTER the loss of Hunter, Harles remained in the Kansas City hospital. They kept her bedridden, lying at a tilt with her head down, pumped full of drugs, steroids and magnesium sulfate in a desperate attempt to keep Hudson inside of her so he could grow large enough to survive. The earliest a premature baby can survive is about 24 weeks. Hunter had been born at 22 weeks.
Harles lay in bed for days. The magnesium sulfate they gave her was to keep her uterus relaxed, but the drug relaxed all of the soft muscles in her body, making her unable to move, chew, or speak.
“It was miserable. It was basically the worst week of my life,” she said. “I was mourning the loss of one child, praying I could save the other.”
They managed to keep Hudson inside for one more week before she went into labor again. This time, there was no stopping it. Hudson was born one week after his brother, at 23 weeks and one day, weighing one pound three ounces. They had to intubate him immediately to help him breathe.
Stan and Keely had to make a decision. Most hospitals would not even try to save an infant born so prematurely. His chances of survival were slim, and even if he did survive, there was a good chance he would have serious health problems. Would it be worth it to save him if he lived his life as a vegetable?
