The Longing Lab Mother of micropreemie discusses the longing in her 147 days in the NICU & explains the "Tell me what's good" strategy
Episode 29 Steph Hauser shares the miraculous birth story of her son Zev, born at 23 weeks (halfway through Steph’s pregnancy) with a 1% survival rate, and the difficult choices they faced. She explains how her "Tell me what's good" strategy helped them find hope and the organizations they began to support NICU families.
Steph Hauser is a writer, podcaster, ultrarunner, and the founder and Executive Director of 4those, a nonprofit dedicated to providing hope, healing and possibility for former micropreemies and their families. This year, she ran 14.7 miles for 147 days (in a row!) to raise money for and bring awareness to the journey many families endure in the NICU. Her story has been featured in Runner’s World Magazine, local and international news outlets, and on a variety of podcasts and stages. Steph is also the host of The Zev Project, a podcast that shares her own journey around extreme prematurity, including the “Tell Me What’s Good” strategy that carried her through their 147 days in the NICU. Steph co-owns FOX•DOG COFFEE with her husband Ben and lives in Louisville, CO, with Ben, their dog, and their four boys. Learn more at 4those.org
In this episode, (in order) we talked about:
*Why longing as an anchor to your past
*How this pregnancy was different than her first (even before delivery)
*Chorioamnionitis, the intraamniotic infection she had
*How do you define viability
*How “Tell me what’s good” approach helped create a fuller narrative
*Miracle guilt
*The important role surrender played in their situation
*How Zev’s micro-prematurity miracle has shaped their family dynamics
*How their organization 4those.org serves families in the NICU
*Why she ran 14.7 miles for 147 consecutive days
Quotes
“Longing for me in that season with ZEV created a great foil for us to sort of look at what we were tying ourselves to past, present, future. What we saw, what we wanted, what we were hoping for…[Longing] joined and partnered with surrender.
“We went from a 0% chance survival to helicoptering down to a hospital where we were given a less than a 1% chance of survival. So, it's not like we suddenly had all these great odds in our favor. However, there was a spirit at this hospital that just said, ‘Hey, we don't know what's going to come. You've got a less than 1% chance here, but do you want to take it now?’”
“We were given the chance, and so we decided to take it and that baby, at 23 weeks gestation, came out of the womb with no lungs, and the first thing he did was cry. This little human just came out and just proclaimed to the world that, against all odds, he was here, and he was fighting.”
“The doctor turns to us, and she's crying, and says, ‘Your son is dying, but he's in there and he's fighting.’”
“It was believing that whether ZEV lived, died or never, never, never, that whatever happened, love or God, however you identify it, would come through, would walk beside us in whatever road came.”
“There were times in the NICU when [my husband and I] were just floating on separate life rafts in the same ocean, like we were tied together by a string on separate life rafts, experiencing our own things, our own pasts are coming into play.”
“If you asked my husband, he would say that God felt very quiet in that time, that God was not very close in that season. And for me, I felt like it was like a front row seat to watching miracles happen all over the place in there…we watched our child be stitched together into humanness.”
“Instead of running away from the hard thing, it brought all pieces of it to the forefront for me, the good, the bad, the glory, the struggle, the grief, you know, the joy all of it. It was like,