Grandma gives birth to her own grandchild

September 8, 2012

Cindy

Chicago, September 8: ?Setting foot in a hospital again, Emily and Mike Jordan couldn't help but feel anxious.

More than two years before, at age 29, Emily had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. But just before she was to undergo a radical hysterectomy, she was told that she was pregnant.

Faced with saving her own life or their unborn child's, the young couple made the excruciating decision to go forward with her surgery. It meant losing the baby, and forfeiting any chance at having their own children.

Or so they thought.

“I can't describe what that was like after finding out you have cancer, after finding out your chance of ever carrying a baby is gone,” Emily says, still stammering at times as she recounts that painful day in 2010.

Simply put, her body no longer had a place where a baby could grow.

But now, more than two years later, she and Mike had come from their suburban Chicago home to the labour and delivery department of a downtown hospital to realise the dream they thought was lost — to become parents, though not the way they, or most people, would have imagined.

Alongside them that day was Emily's mother, Cindy Reutzel — a fit, silver-haired 53-year-old grandmother whose profile revealed a round belly, a pregnant belly.

Reutzel was about to give birth to her own grandchild.

Just 34 years ago, Louise Brown, the first “test tube” baby, was born in Great Britain. The result? A veritable in-vitro baby boom.

It started with would-be mothers in their 20s and 30s. “Then people started pushing the envelope,” says Dr Helen Kim, director of the in vitro

fertilisation programme at the University of Chicago. “If you could help a menopausal woman in her 30s, could you help a menopausal woman in her 40s? And then it became, ‘Can you help a menopausal woman in her 50s?'

“And the answer is yes.”

Some older women were having their own babies. But more often, they were using egg donors to have their own children, or serving as surrogates or “gestational carriers”.

There was the 51-year-old grandmother in Brazil who gave birth to her twin grandchildren in 2007. There've been others, grandmothers in their 40s or 50s and even 60s.

Cindy Reutzel, Emily's mom, had a vague recollection of those stories. So when doctors shared the good news that they had been able to keep Emily's ovaries intact, Reutzel immediately made the offer.

“What if I carried your baby for you?” she asked.

Emily and Mike didn't take it too seriously at first. “We didn't really think that was a realistic option,” says Emily, who works in hospital administration.

It turned out, though, that it wasn't really that far-fetched after all, particularly for a young grandmother who's in good health, like Reutzel.

After a process that included psychological evaluation and hormonal manipulation to prepare their bodies, Kim eventually implanted Reutzel's uterus with an embryo created with an egg from Emily and Mike's sperm.

It was no easy process, with a regimen of hormonal shots. Work schedules were interrupted and vacations postponed. But Reutzel was committed.

“The thought of Emily and Mike not being able to have children and share that piece of their lives with someone just broke my heart,” says Reutzel, who lives in Chicago and is executive director at medical foundation. “I want Emily to have that connection with another human being like I had with her.”

As her belly grew, people started asking about “her baby”. But she was quick to tell them the story. This was not her baby, she was Grandma.

Admittedly, she says, she worried about the physical toll pregnancy might take, though her body handled it better than she expected. She also wondered how well she'd bounce back from a Caesarean section. That's how she had delivered Emily and her older brother, but that had been three decades ago.

Still, she reassured Emily and Mike throughout the pregnancy that the baby was fine, she was fine, everything would be fine.

Humour helped. Mike often teased his mother-in-law each time they'd take her to dinner or do something nice for her.

“Are we even yet?” he'd ask.

“Not yet,” she'd reply, laughing.

In truth, Mike and Emily knew there'd really be no way to repay this kind of gesture.

“This is a continuation of everything that she has done her entire life for me, which is to make sure that I have the best life possible,” Emily says.

All they could do, they said, was to promise to raise their baby as best they could. And that was enough for Reutzel.

“I know I gave a gift,” she says. “But I'm also getting so much in return.”

Last week, a few days after Emily's 32nd birthday, daughter sat next to mother, holding hands in the delivery room.

And Elle Cynthia Jordan was born.

“She looks just like you! She looks just like you!” Emily shouted, running from the delivery room to introduce their newborn to Mike.

Reutzel is recovering well. She even says she'd consider doing it again.

“When I watch both of them hold that baby and look into her face, it's like everything I could have imagined wanting for them — better than I could have imagined,” she says, her eyes filling with tears.

“This is what it was all about for me.”

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News Network
May 2,2020

Balochistan, May 1: Sajid Hussain, Editor-in-Chief of Balochistan Times, has been found dead in a Swedish town, the police have confirmed.

The Swedish police informed his family on Thursday night that they discovered his body from a river in Uppsala, The Times reported.
The Baloch journalist had been missing from the Swedish city since March 2 this year.

Sajid, 39, left Pakistan in 2012 and had been living as a refugee in Sweden since 2017. He wrote extensively on the suffering of the Balochis at the hands of the Pakistani military establishment.

His work often got him into trouble as the authorities did not like his reporting of Balochistan's forbidden stories, the reason he had to leave and live in exile.

The Baloch journalist was found dead two months after he went missing in Sweden.
Sajid left Pakistan because of security threats from Pakistan Army and its intelligence service ISI.

The spokesperson of the Baloch National Movement, Hammal Haider told news agency: "We are deeply saddened by the demise of prominent Baloch intellectual and writer Sajid Hussain."
"His death is indeed a loss of a great mind for the people of Balochistan. Due to his straightforwardness, he was loved among all journalistic, literary and political circles," added Haider.

"After this incident, we have serious concerns about our members and other Baloch refugees living in the West," he said.

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News Network
June 13,2020

Jun 13: Requiring the wearing of masks to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus in areas at the epicenter of the global pandemic may have prevented tens of thousands of infections, a new study suggests.

Mask-wearing is even more important for preventing the virus' spread and the sometimes deadly COVID-19 illness it causes than social distancing and stay-at-home orders, researchers said, in the study published in PNAS: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

Infection trends shifted dramatically when mask-wearing rules were implemented on April 6 in northern Italy and April 17 in New York City - at the time among the hardest hit areas of the world by the health crisis - the study found.

"This protective measure alone significantly reduced the number of infections, that is, by over 78,000 in Italy from April 6 to May 9 and over 66,000 in New York City from April 17 to May 9," researchers calculated.

When mask-wearing went into effect in New York, the daily new infection rate fell by about 3% per day, researchers said. In the rest of the country, daily new infections continued to increase.

Direct contact precautions - social distancing, quarantine and isolation, and hand sanitizing - were all in place before mask-wearing rules went into effect in Italy and New York City. But they only help minimize virus transmission by direct contact, while face covering helps prevent airborne transmission, the researchers say.

"The unique function of face covering to block atomization and inhalation of virus-bearing aerosols accounts for the significantly reduced infections," they said. That would indicate "that airborne transmission of COVID-19 represents the dominant route for infection."

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday urged organizers of large gatherings that involve "shouting, chanting or singing to strongly encourage the use of cloth face coverings to lower the risk of spreading the coronavirus."

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News Network
June 4,2020

New York, Jun 4: The Minneapolis police officer who used his knee to pin down George Floyd's neck before his death was the most experienced of the four officers involved in the arrest, with a record that included medals for bravery and 17 complaints against him, including one for pulling a woman out of her car during a speeding stop.

New details about Derek Chauvin and the other now-fired officers emerged Wednesday after prosecutors upgraded Chauvin's charge to second-degree murder and charged the others with aiding and abetting in a case that has convulsed the nation with protests over race and police brutality.

Heavily redacted personnel files show that Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the force, was initially trained as a cook and served in the Army as a military police officer.

Eleven-year veteran and native Hmong speaker Tou Thao began as a community service officer and was the subject of six complaints.

The other two officers were relative newcomers to the department, including Thomas Lane, a former juvenile detention guard who did volunteer work with Somali refugees, and J. Alexander Kueng, who got his start in law enforcement by patrolling his college campus and a department store.

The files were notable for what they didn't include. Only one of the 17 complaints against Chauvin was detailed, none of the six against Thao were mentioned and there was no further detail about a 2017 excessive force lawsuit against Thao.

Records show that the 44-year-old Chauvin initially studied cooking before taking courses in law enforcement and doing two stints in the Army as a military police officer in the late 1990s, serving at Fort Benning, Georgia, and in Germany.

Chauvin became a Minneapolis police officer in 2001 and the lone reprimand in his file involved a 2007 incident when he was accused of pulling a woman out of her car after stopping her for going 10 mph (16 kph) over the speed limit.

Investigators found it was not necessary for Chauvin to remove the woman from the car and noted that his squad car video was turned off during the stop.

But Chauvin was also singled out for bravery. Files show he won two medals of valor, one in 2006 for being part of a group of officers who opened fire on a stabbing suspect who pointed a shotgun at them, and another in 2008 for a domestic violence incident in which Chauvin broke down a bathroom door and shot a suspect in the stomach.

He also won medals of commendation in 2008 after he and his partner tackled a fleeing suspect who had a pistol in his hand, and in 2009 for single-handedly apprehending a group of gang members while working as an off-duty security guard at the El Nuevo Rodeo, a Minneapolis nightclub.

Since his arrest, the former owner of the club, Maya Santamaria, said Chauvin and Floyd both worked as security guards there at various times but that she wasn't sure if they had known one another.

She said Chauvin was unnecessarily aggressive on nights when the club had a black clientele, quelling fights by dousing the crowd with pepper spray and calling in several police squad cars as backup, a tactic she called “overkill.”

Chauvin's wife, Kellie, a Laotian immigrant who became the first Hmong winner of the Mrs. Minnesota pageant, said shortly after his arrest last week that she intends to divorce him.

Before news of the upgraded charges, an attorney for Chauvin said he was not making any statements at this time. Lawyers for the others did not return messages seeking comment.

In cellphone video of the May 25 arrest of Floyd, Chauvin is shown pressing his knee onto Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes while Floyd cries out “I can't breathe” and eventually stops moving.

During much of the arrest, Kueng and Lane were helping Chauvin restrain Floyd. Thao was standing nearby keeping onlookers back.

According the complaint, at one point during the arrest, as Chauvin held Floyd down with his knee, Lane asked Chauvin twice whether they should roll Floyd over.

“No, staying put where we got him,” Chauvin replied, “I am worried about excited delirium or whatever,” Lane said. And Chauvin replied again, “That's why we have him on his stomach.” None of the three officers moved from their positions.

Lane joined the police early last year as a 35-year-old cadet — much older than most rookies — and became a full-fledged officer last December. He had no complaints in his file during his short time on the force.

On employment forms, the University of Minnesota graduate said he done volunteer work tutoring Somali youth and as a mentor helping at-risk elementary school students with reading and homework.”

Kueng, at 26 the youngest of the four officers, was also a recent recruit to the police force. He completed his year's probation just three months before the Floyd arrest.

His personnel file, which notes that he speaks, reads and writes Russian, did not include any commendations or disciplinary actions during his short time on force.

Kueng was a 2018 graduate of the University of Minnesota, where he worked part-time as part of the campus security force. He also worked nearly three years as a theft-prevention officer at Macy's.

Thao joined the police force part-time in 2008 while attending a community college. Before that, he worked as a security guard, a supermarket stocker and trainer at McDonald's.

City records show six complaints were filed against Thao, but there was no mention of that in the records released Wednesday. There also was no mention of a 2017 federal lawsuit accusing him and another officer of excessive force.

According to the lawsuit, Lamar Ferguson claimed that in 2014, Thao and his partner stopped him and beat him up while he was on his way to his girlfriend's house. The lawsuit was settled for $25,000 ___

Richmond reported from Madison, Wisconsin. Associated Press writer Scott Bauer in Madison and researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.

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