But what really got their attention was when everyone in the room got a look at my wife's placenta. Apparently, it was such an aberration that nurses, doctors, and interns from all over the labor and delivery ward came filing in to gawk at it. (Note: You never want hospital staff to find you this interesting, even if you're just there to visit.) The shock came from how it was such a grievous example of a marginal cord insertion that everyone was puzzled as to how any fetus could possibly have survived on that little nutrition.
But survive he sure as hell did. Also, you'll notice this is not the end of the article.
2
Once The "Miracle" Birth Was Out Of The Way, The Real Fun Began
Movies teach you that crises get more and more dire until, through courage and determination, you finally emerge on the other side, stronger and better. Real life is more like a slasher movie franchise, where they have to keep finding excuses to plunge the heroes back into the nightmare, over and over.
First, Joe manifested symptoms of an epic case of colic -- sudden, inexplicable, ear-piercing shrieking at random times. Colic is a controversial subject, with pharmacies happily willing to sell you all manner of mysterious witch's-cauldron-sounding concoctions with names like "gripe water" to cure it. But at least this was a relatively normal phenomenon, and the passage of time eventually ended the constant howling.
In the next few years, though, Joey would be diagnosed with ADHD and ODD (oppositional defiant disorder -- you can guess the symptoms from the name). Those two things in combination lead to a child who is extremely hard to teach and discipline without exacerbating the problem. So did these diagnoses have anything to do with the gauntlet of near-fatal disasters he faced in the womb? Was it some as yet undiscovered side effect of surviving a misoprostol murder attempt? Nobody knew. The problem with being a rare medical case is that there isn't much data to go by.