So Sad! Anna ‘In Denial’ About Son’s Traumatic Premature Birth

“I did gain a lot of weight with my pregnancy, and I’ve never had more paparazzi follow me,” she wrote. “I knew why, of course. I was on the bump watch. At the time, I honestly didn’t give a f**k, probably because my brain was numb with pregnancy hormones and I was in a blissful state and all I wanted to do was eat.”

“So even though Jack was born about two months early, I gained seventy pounds,” she bragged.

“By the time I was thirty weeks in, I was feeling lucky,” she recalled. “Sure, I had restless legs and backaches, but I was active and my regular ultrasounds were all good, and compared to the horror stores I’d heard from some friends I was having an easy time.”

“Then, on the morning of August 10 – when I was thirty weeks and one day – I woke up at two fifteen to a massive gush,” she wrote. “The bed was soaked, and even though I felt the flud coming out of my vagina, I smelled it to make sure it wasn’t pee.”

“I was completely unprepared for anything dramatic like that to happen,” Faris continued. “I called my OB’s office, and I’ll never forget the way the on-call doctor said, very calmly, ‘Sooooo, you need to go to Cedars-Cinai. Right now.’”

“Even after that phone call, it never really occurred to me that Jack was coming,” she admitted. “I thought, I’ll go to the hospital, then maybe I’ll be home in a few hours. I know that sounds stupid, it was stupid, but I was in denial.”

Pratt, 38, threw essentials in a bag for them, and rushed her to the hospital where she was “pumped” full with magnesium to stop the labor.

“It felt horrible,” she recalled. “I could sort of feel it going through my veins and it as incredibly painful – the best way I can describe it is like having a headache throughout your entire body.”

She was put on hospital bed rest after her labor came to a halt, and Pratt came to the hospital every night to keep her company as he was filming during the day. The doctors wanted to keep her for a month, but “in the early morning of her seventh day of bed rest, she started cramping really badly.”

Again, she was “in denial” about going into labor and “tried to downplay the intensity of the pain” until the nurses finally told her that Jack was arriving. The beginning stages of labor were a “blur,” but she remembered her doctor telling her that she may not be able to hold Jack right after birth because of his premature status.

“That’s where the unexpected nature of this whole fiasco really hit home,” she wrote. “When you have a healthy pregnancy, you never wonder if you’ll get to hold your son right after he’s born. It’s a given. I was terrified, but I also knew I had to be a soldier.”

Faris was able to briefly hold Jack after his birth, but he was held in the NICU for almost a month.

“On our fourth day in the NICU, the pediatric neurosurgeon sat Chris and me down to tell us that Jack had some severe brain bleeding and there was a chance that he could be developmentally disabled,” she recalled. “We wouldn’t know until he was eighteen months old, the doctors said.”

Faris and Pratt were in “complete shock” but leaned on each other to push forward.

“Even after we got home I was taking Jack to daily appointments with brain specialists and heart specialists and eye doctors and physical therapists,” Faris said. “We continued to hope for the best, but we knew that we wouldn’t be sure about Jack’s development for some time.”

“Today, he’s a happy five-year-old full of wonder and mischief,” Faris reported. “He still has a couple of physical problems – his legs have high tone and often appear stiff, so he walks on his tiptoes a lot. He wears glasses and has to wear an eye patch for twenty minutes a day to strengthen his vision. But given that these are the biggest challenges, we count ourselves as extremely lucky.”