Born 18 weeks early to an Oklahoma family, a premature baby girl is beating all the odds as she approaches her first birthday.
Cherie Malarney, 41, and Eric Malarney, 44, from Oklahoma City, have been married for nine years. They had three sons together before Cherie became pregnant with their first daughter. Due to her age, it was considered a high-risk pregnancy.
Baby Eris was due on March 27 this year, but on Nov. 19, 2021, Cherie developed preeclampsia, a disorder of pregnancy characterized by high blood pressure. She was rushed to Oklahoma Children’s Hospital. The couple had only found out the week prior that they were expecting a baby girl.
Suddenly, Cherie’s dreams of a happy pregnancy, complete with a baby shower, and maternity photoshoot, were dashed.
“I woke at 6 a.m. bleeding,” she told The Epoch Times. “After having uncontrollable high blood pressure for a couple days, the doctor recommended for me to deliver, but my heart wouldn’t let me. A doctor told me I would have to stay in the hospital until my due date ... I was unprepared, but willing and ready to do whatever it took.”
The next day in the hospital, Cherie’s blood pressure increased. Doctors again recommended she deliver, but warned that her baby girl would not make it.
‘I Immediately Fell to the Floor and Prayed to God’
Cherie said: “They explained to me that babies that size just don’t survive. I told the doctor, ‘She is strong and I feel her moving all the time.’ His reply to me was, ‘That doesn’t matter—babies that size don’t make it.’“The doctors left the room, and I immediately fell to the floor and prayed to God.”
Thinking of her husband and sons, and the fact that she risked a life-threatening hemorrhage, Cherie agreed to an emergency Caesarean section. Prayer gave her and Eric the strength to hope their baby would survive. They pleaded with doctors, “Do everything you can to save her.”
Eris was delivered on Nov. 23, 2021, at 22 weeks and two days gestation. She weighed just 12.5 ounces (0.35 kg) and was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where doctors predicted she would not survive beyond 48 hours. If she did, they said, she would not have any quality of life, and not be able to walk, talk, run, or do the things that most kids do.
But the miracle baby, Eris, had other ideas.
‘Without Our Faith, She Would Not Be Here’
Cherie said that seeing their baby girl for the first time was one of their “proudest moments in life.”“She was strong, like we said she was,” Cherie said. “It was also the scariest time of our entire life. [But] once we made it past those first 48 hours, we knew that God was going to keep her. She is a blessing from above.”
Eric was the first to visit their daughter in the NICU. Cherie, heavily medicated after the birth, first saw her little girl 24 hours later.
It was touch-and-go for the first two days. Eris was resuscitated twice on Thanksgiving; both times, Cherie and Eric were called in to say goodbye. “I screamed and prayed to God while they were working on her,” Cherie said.
In late December, Eris contracted necrotizing enterocolitis, which caused an intestinal blockage and her lungs to collapse every day in the month of January. She had numerous blood transfusions and a stomach drain placed to empty her bowel. She contracted sepsis and meningitis. After a grade 4 brain bleed and hydrocephalus, she had a shunt fitted and has since had 12 surgeries to fix malfunctions or infections caused by the shunt.
“I believe without our faith, she would not be here,” Cherie said. “My family has been praying non-stop from the moment I found out I had to deliver.
“She has defeated the odds every step of the way; she has done everything that they said she wouldn’t do from the moment she was born.”
Holding Onto Faith
Eris remained on an oxygen ventilator for her first seven months of life, and at the time of Cherie’s interview with The Epoch Times, had spent 318 days in the NICU. Cherie has spent up to eight hours at the hospital every day, all while managing her home and home-schooling her 6-year-old, while Eric works to pay their impending medical bills.“It’s mentally exhausting. For months I would get anxiety every time my phone rang,” Cherie said. “Being in here feels like being on a rollercoaster ride, and no one will stop and let you off.”
But Cherie balances the stress of Eris’s ups and downs by focusing on the precious moments, like dressing up her baby in “beautiful clothes with a matching bow” and taking photos.
Eris needs one more shunt revision, a feeding tube, and laser eye surgery for ROP eye disease (a condition that can lead to blindness in preemies with very low birth weights).
The couple’s main concerns are Eris’s brain damage, seizures, hydrocephalus, and chronic lung disease. She may also have cerebral palsy. But amid constant bloodwork, MRIs, ultrasounds, surgeries, and visits with therapists and specialists, Cherie describes her now-10-month-old, 18-pound daughter as “the sweetest and strongest little baby in the whole world.”
“She is unfazed by anything,” she said.
Every time Eris gets close to a discharge date, something comes up. At the time of writing, she has a blood clot and will spend her first birthday in the hospital. But Cherie hopes her baby will head home before the year is out; her family is finally at a “place of healing, instead of surviving.”
