[Shortness8]

I'm sorry you went through this experience, and I'm glad your son is alive and (hopefully) well.

I don't have the ins and outs of your case. I'm a student, not an obsterician, or neonatologist. That said, I do know delivering a 25 weeker is insanely risky even if perfect care is provided, for both his immediate outcomes and avoiding long-term disability. (80% of babies born before 26w have some form of disability e.g low IQ, blindness, etc [1]).

No sane obstetrician is going to deliver based on a family opinion like that - it is a true last resort. If you were wrong, or less lucky, as horrible as it is to say, your son would not be with us and the surgeon would be out of a job with the "what if" on their conscious (which trust me, all obstericians have anyway).

When your son needed to be delivered, it sounded like he was delivered. Frankly no neonatal respiratory distress at 22 weeks sounds insanely lucky to me; normally before 35 weeks it's a concern.

I can't say if this was a failure of the medical professionals in charge of your care or not, but from the information you've given us it doesn't sound like it. Tens, maybe hundreds of patients will have presented identically to your partner with a far less severe diagnosis. Getting their babies out early could have left them permanently disabled or dead, on the offchance it was percreta/accreta/increta: especially in the absence of definitive imaging, which they did attempt to perform. Medicine is not perfect by a long shot. Managing uncertainty is one of the many skills of senior doctors.

Medicine isn't as simple as a lot of people in this thread think it to be.

DOI: Medical Student

[1]: https://www.tommys.org/pregnancy-information/premature-birth...

[thelittleone]

No need for sorry, but I appreciate it. I had no intention of implying medicine is simple. Yet the point remains. Doctors cannot read all cases nor memorize all those they do. Unless they have skilled researchers standing by, relevant cases will be missed. If AI (or a human) can analysis that data then its perfectly reasonable to take it into consideration.

In our cases, her condition was deteriorating at a frightening rate. She could barely speak. Under such stress one must also consider the possibility her body giving up and aborting the pregnancy. Doctors had put cameras up and down and ultra sound etc. They were trying to keep her going as long as possible to give baby the best chance. I definitely would not advocate for anyone to make rash decisions in such delicate situations, and of course, my post omitted myriad details for brevity.

The cause was later determined to be the result of a D&C for retained placenta that was performed following the birth of our first child a few years earlier.