Hypoxic

= below normal levels of oxygen

Eschemic

= restriction in blood supply to tissues, causing a shortage of oxygen and glucose needed for cellular metabolism (to keep tissue alive)

Encephalopathy

= a disease in which the functioning of the brain is affected by some agent or condition

HIE Help Center
Mar 7, 2017
Dear Ms. Lemay,

My name is Genevieve and I’m writing to you as a fan of Wise Woman Way of Birth and a contributor to a new website devoted to childhood disability. Our website specializes in helping parents care for their children with HIE. We know that your posts approach a number of different topics surrounding birth, and we found the post “$70 Million Birth Injury Case” to be quite similar to our website’s platform and goals.

We understand that many parents may be going to your site and reading about birth injuries, perhaps after facing a diagnosis they aren’t sure about themselves. We would thus be so grateful if you considered adding a link to our page, which discusses HIE, a neonatal brain injury that causes disability throughout childhood and adulthood. I help run www.HIEHelpCenter.org, an informational website for parents of kids that were recently diagnosed with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). Our website is one of the only sites devoted to HIE on the Internet, and in order to raise awareness of this particular disability, we wanted to ask you if you would consider including us as a link on your blog in a blog post.

Thank you for your time!
Sincerely,
Genevieve Kotasek
HIE Help Center Community Outreach Coordinator

From: Gloria Lemay
June 10, 2017
To: HIE
Hi Genevieve, you wrote to me some time ago and I have just now been able to go and see your site. I looked over the “prevention” section and was surprised to NOT see two of the prevention things that I think are most crucial to making sure that infants get all the oxygen to their brains that they need.
1. leaving the umbilical cord alone (not cutting) until it has fully stopped pulsing. (Resuscitation can be done, if necessary, right on the mother’s abdomen and the cord is the baby’s life line)
2. avoiding the use of pain meds in birth. The mother has been so careful to not drink alcohol, take drugs unnecessarily, and eat well. Then, on the day of the birth, she is medicated for many hours with an epidural which freezes her from her breasts to her thighs. This is right where the baby is located. That baby is getting all that numbing medication, too. Moral support and less systemic meds would be a better way to go. Any woman who knows that her baby might be brain injured by an epidural would say “no” to it. Better to have a day of pain than a lifetime of suffering for the child. Most women don’t know about that and the doctors don’t realize it because they don’t see the problems that the child faces.

I think this is the type of information that could really give your readers power in the face of HIE. Gloria Lemay, Vancouver BC Canada
“$70 Million Birth Injury Case”