Couple celebrates 'miracle baby' By Peggy O'Farrell • pofarrell@enquirer.com • December 23, 2009

Now her doctor says she should have bought lottery tickets: The Cherry Grove woman and her daughter, Addison Paige, are both doing just fine nearly six months after delivery.

Loudon, now 30, had already survived one potentially deadly bout with blood clots, and doctors warned her against pregnancy, worried she might not survive a second round.

Her pregnancy was a surprise. But Loudon credits a combination of determination, medicine and prayer for her survival - and her daughter's healthy birth.

"It was very, very scary," she said. "You have all these doctors sitting there, and they never once said, 'It's going to be OK.'"

To think, it all started with a back ache.

It was July 2006, and Loudon went to the hospital, hoping to find out what was causing the severe pain.

"They couldn't find anything and they sent me home," she said. "Then a couple days later, the pain moved around to the front of my stomach area."

A second trip to the emergency room produced no answers.

Two days after that, her legs swelled up, and the pain was so bad she couldn't walk.

That time, she got an answer: Blood clots. She was admitted for 17 days and treated with blood thinners.

When she was released, doctors referred her to a specialist at University Hospital.

There, doctors did an ultrasound, and she was immediately admitted to the hospital.

"They found out I had blood clots in both legs, from the rib cage down," Loudon said. "There were so many they couldn't even count them all."

What the five doctors did count was especially scary: Three blood clots were lodged in a major blood vessel in Loudon's heart, and two more in the major artery in the abdomen and pelvis.

The blood clots in Loudon's heart were lodged in the vena cava, the blood vessel that carries blood from the body back to the lungs to be re-oxygenated.

She needed immediate surgery. Amy Reed, a vascular surgeon at University Hospital and the University of Cincinnati, cleaned out the blood clots and placed five permanent stents to widen the affected arteries and prevent future clots.

"The real concern was that one of those blood clots could have dislodged and gone to her lungs and killed her," Reed said.

After the surgery, she was prescribed blood thinners to prevent future blood clots, and over the next several months, was slowly weaned off of them.

Loudon and her doctors don't know why she developed the blood clots. She is a non-smoker with no family history of clotting disorders.

In July 2008, she and her husband, Cory, decided they wanted to have a baby.

They talked to Arthur Evans, chairman of the obstetrics and gynecology department at the University of Cincinnati and a specialist at University Hospital.

Evans warned the couple that pregnancy could increase her risk of developing more blood clots, and the weight of the developing baby could crush the stents in her abdomen and pelvis.

He suggested they see a fertility specialist about finding a surrogate to carry their baby.

Then, sometime around Veteran's Day 2008, Loudon learned she was already four weeks' pregnant.

Family, friends and doctors warned the couple of the dangers she might face.

"They told me there was a 50 percent chance I might die," Loudon said.

The Loudons decided to focus on the chance she'd survive, and chose to continue the pregnancy.

So Evans and Reed started working on a plan to help Loudon and her baby survive.

Few women have gotten pregnant after having abdominal stents implanted, Evans said, and only half of them have survived.

Loudon went back on blood thinners. As her pregnancy continued, she underwent 10 ultrasounds so doctors could see how her growing baby might be affecting the stents in her abdomen and pelvis.

Surgery to go in and repair or replace the stents was a possibility, Evans said, "but it would have been a very difficult situation."

At seven months, she switched from working full-time to three days a week.

"On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I sat with my feet up," Loudon said.

Everything could have gone wrong. But nothing did.

"She's a very brave woman,'' Evans sad. "She was very determined to carry this through. It's always amazing to me how brave women are who have very difficult medical problems during their pregnancies."

On July 6, just two weeks before she was due, Addison was delivered by Caesarean section.

A vaginal delivery was too risky, Evans said. Labor would have put too much pressure on the stents.

He was thrilled to see his patients beat the odds.

"She probably should have been buying lottery tickets," he said. "Maybe one for her and one for me."

Since Addison's birth, Loudon hasn't developed any more blood clots, and she's now off all medications.

"It went perfectly," Loudon said. "It was scary, but it was well worth it. We have our little miracle baby."

Great Story about 2 brothers

Oakdale boy breaks a leg for kid brother

Pushing him out of way of car was just 'instinct'

By Merrill Balassone

mbalassone@modbee.com 

OAKDALE — Eleven-year-old Adrian Zavala likes to help his younger brother with homework and get him ready for school. He drapes his arm around the 8-year-old when they walk places. Adrian's mother says she sometimes has to remind him to act like a kid.

So it made sense when neighborhood parents and children told Siarah Vegas her son had pushed his younger brother out of the way of an oncoming car.

Adrian was thrown onto the hood, his thigh bone broken. Jesse Barrera, 8, walked away with bruises and aches.

 Siarah Vegas, 32, kisses her son Jesse Barrera, 8. According to neighborhood witnesses, as brothers Adrian Zavala, 11, and Jesse Barrera, 8, were walking to Fair Oaks Elementary School, a car made a turn into their path and Adrian pushed Jesse out of they way of the oncoming vehicle. Adrian was struck by the vehicle and suffered a broken distal femur. Jesse did not suffer any injuries according to the Oakdale Police Department. Dec. 12, 2009.

"That's just natural for Adrian," Vegas said in an interview at her house Saturday. "I wouldn't have expected anything less from him."

On Wednesday morning, the brothers were walking to Fair Oaks Elementary School when they were hit by a car turning left from North Lee Avenue onto Pontiac Street, just a few doors down from their house.

Oakdale police officer Michael Walsh said the driver was blinded momentarily by the sun as he turned east onto Pontiac. He will not be cited, Walsh said.

There is a four-way stop at the intersection that's a few hundred yards south of the school. Walsh called it a "traffic nightmare." Since the collision, parent volunteers have been seen helping students cross there.

Adrian's stepfather, Alfred Vegas, heard the sirens and his phone began to ring. He knew immediately something was wrong and ran out to the scene.

Siarah Vegas said she had just started allowing the two to walk to school together. It would be their last chance to do so until high school.

"It was their moment in the morning," Vegas said. "Adrian's at that age where he wants to take more responsibility. I would watch them walk down the street. You think, 'How much can happen?' "

Saturday was Adrian's first day back from the hospital, where he had two screws put into his leg. It will take as long as three months to heal.

He rested his cast on a pillow while playing video games next to his dog Peanut.

Adrian doesn't remember much about the collision. He described being in the air as if he were doing a cartwheel, then everything went black.

Paramedics had to cut from Adrian's shoulders his favorite Quiksilver backpack, which he earned by doing chores and yardwork. Siarah Vegas said parents at Fair Oaks Elementary plan to raise money to replace it.

Adrian shrugs off any great importance of his actions, calling them just an "instinct."

What Adrian's really concerned about is showing up at his school band concert, even though he can't play the drums yet.

He pleads with his mom: Can he, crutches, cast and all, be there in the audience?

Now For the "Mildly Different" Today......

Hello All:

Below here is some videos that have the former queen of France in them, Marie Antoinette, as portrayed in a couple of movies, one from 1938, then one from 2006.  I know this much about the one video that is in this montage that involves a mean spirited letter from Marie Antoinette's mom, Queen Maria Theresa  --  Marie Antoinette actually did recieve that letter from her mom and yes, it was extremely mean spirited from Queen Maria Theresa.

That letter in question, Queen Maria Theresa in essence, rips Marie Antoinette a new one, because Queen Maria Theresa had sent Marie Antoinette to France to be married to the douphan, (at the time), Louis Auguste, the guy who would later become King Louis XVI, to keep peace between Austria and France.  Queen Maria Theresa had made it crystal clear to Marie Antoinette that in not so many words that Maria Theresa expected Marie Antoinette to put out and make babies with Louis Auguste and it it pretty much pronto, (right after Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste were "Officially" married in France, on their wedding night.)

Part of me always wondered about Marie Antoinette as a person, because although Marie Antoinette lived a pampered life for the vast majority of her live, not only in the Austrian court, at the beginning of Marie Antoinette's life, but  for most of Marie Antoinette's life in the French court, as Queen of France.  I imagine that Marie Antoinette wasn't 100% happy with her life and all of that freedom, because it is said that King Louis XVI wasn't exactly the best of husbands towards Marie Antoinette.  I don't think that King Louis XVI was a very good husband to Marie Antoinette, not up until the very end of it all, when both Louis and Marie knew that they would soon be seeing the end of their lives and they would be getting executed.

Part of me also feels sorry in a way towards King Louis XVI, because he always had what I call and "Ugly duckling syndrome," where King Louis XVI didn't feel "Worthy" to be the king of France, much less have a somewhat pretty lady, (like Marie Antoinette) for a wife.  It is my understanding that King Louis XVI was a bit of a porker and an ackward teenager, when he and Marie Antoinette met for the first time as teenagers, near the borders of France and Austria.

If King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived today and both of them met me, (as they looked when they first met each other), I could imagine seeing King Louis XVI looking like a greasy haired, pimply, braces ridden teenager and Marie Antoinette looking like a party girl, who just partied for part of the night with her girls at some bar somewhere.  Of course, I also would see that the both of them would be cleaned up drastically now as well  --  King Louis XVI would at least have some Clearsil or like some other kind of acne medicine to wipe his face with and Marie Antoinette would still need a few years of being taught to "Tone it down" to be the respectable lady that she ends up being at the end of her life.

I also can't imagine going from extreme wealth (on both King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette's parts) to being poor, prisioners; who are waiting to be executed by the new national government for just being who they were  --  the deposed leaders of the same country.  I know that if it was me, I would have seen to it that my children were taken somewhere far, far away from all of that bad stuff, if I was Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, but I don't think that they were that lucky.  I know that their oldest son, King Louis XVII was executed inside of the prison or went missing or something along those lines, shortly after King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were both executed.

Any way, here are the videos, folks.  Oh, and speaking of these videos  --  I almost forgot to mention that mixed in with these videos about Marie Antoinette are actual Queen rock videos as well, right along with some other various local, (in Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati, Ohio area) videos here as well!  So happy viewing, folks!!