The L.A. Fires and a Disabled Child

Because no two paths to parenthood look the same, “How I Got This Baby” is a series that invites parents to share their stories.

Annie was preparing to begin IVF when she discovered she was already pregnant. She and her husband and their 4-year-old daughter, Sophie, who cannot walk and has no head control, had moved to the Altadena neighborhood of L.A. two years earlier. “We were tucked in the mountains, basically,” she says. “We would go for walks and find horse farms. It was just such a magical place.” Sophie was about to start at a specialized public school that Annie said felt like a dream come true. “She goes swimming at her school four times a week. If Heaven was on earth, it would be this school,” says Annie. “She’ll be in it until she’s 22 years old.” 

When Sophie was 3 months old, she had a seizure “that just didn’t go away,” says Annie. A brain scan soon revealed she would have severe, lifelong disabilities. “That experience, I think, is why it took us so long to even try for another baby,” she explains. 

Although Annie’s second pregnancy felt like a miracle, it was high risk owing to her age, and complications arose fairly quickly. At 18 weeks, she started spotting, and one night, she says, “a big chunk of blood” came out. She went to the hospital, where doctors discovered that her cervix had shortened significantly. “There wasn’t much holding the baby in, basically,” she says. “They put me on modified bed rest and gave me progesterone tabs that I inserted every day.”  

Then, at 23 weeks and five days pregnant in August 2024, following a festive dinner out with her in-laws, her water broke. 

Here, Annie recalls what happened next. 

For some reason, I believed that if your water breaks, the baby’s coming. But when I went to the hospital, they were like, “Okay, we’re going to wait. We’re going to pray that your baby doesn’t come tonight.” And then it became “We’re going to pray that the baby doesn’t come for another three days” — and then a week.

They give you a special calculator, and it tells you what might happen to the baby if they’re born at different gestations — all the disabilities they may have and that kind of stuff. I really felt, No, we cannot have another disabled child. Physically, mentally — no. After I made it through that first night and the baby didn’t come, that’s when we had to have that talk: Did we want to consider termination? But we kept holding out. Every week, we’d look at the calculator and check the chances of survival and the possible bad outcomes.

It was especially stressful because there was a little tear in my uterus, which increases the chance of infection, which can cause you to go into labor. And I had basically no water in my belly. It had all gushed out. Some people have slow leaks where there’s still a lot of amniotic fluid in there, but not me. Yet somehow, at 25 weeks, the baby decided to turn all the way around — so he was head up, feet down, in the breech position.

I managed to keep him in for three weeks at the hospital.

At 26 weeks, I went into labor.

My husband was there holding my hand and trying not to look over the curtain, because a lot of stuff was going on over there. I was most concerned about the pain. I was so scared.

When it comes to premature babies, our son, Max, came out pretty big: two pounds, seven ounces, which in terms of 26 weeks is good. He went straight to the NICU. After labor, I got wheeled up there. It was really intense to see a second child being intubated.

I stayed in the hospital for a week recovering from surgery and then I got discharged to go home. I couldn’t physically leave the house for three or four days, but once I was feeling better, I began going to the hospital every day to see Max. It was kind of amazing because I had just gotten my driver’s license. I grew up in Queens and never got one as a teenager and then after we moved to L.A., there was the pandemic and everything happened with our daughter, so I just kept putting it off. But I finally did it, and when this happened, I realized, Okay, you’re going to have to drive to Cedars-Sinai every single day! I would get there in the morning after I dropped off our daughter at school and stay until about 6 p.m. Thankfully, we have a nurse who stays with our daughter after school.

There are all these stages in the NICU. The first stage is looking through the glass, basically, and then being able to put your hand in those little holes — it’s called “hand hugs.” So you just kind of hug them with your hands.

After about a week, the nurses said we could hold Max. Skin to skin is so important, but it was really hard for me to do it. I was so scared that I was going to move too suddenly and then the tube was going to shift and hurt him. I was on so many Reddit threads about intubation, and they were like, “Oh, some people have really low voices when they become adults because they were intubated when they were younger.” I was like, Oh no. Oh my God. I was just thinking of the craziest things.

For the rest of the time Max was in the NICU, it was all about skin to skin — I drove there every day and just held him as much as possible.

The day he was extubated was really scary because that can go all sorts of directions. Some babies have to be reintubated because they can’t breathe on their own. It was a really tough day, but he did well.

Through all of this, I was pumping religiously because that’s all you can do. In fact, I had too much milk, so we bought a second fridge for the garage, and I filled it with breast milk.

After ten weeks in the hospital, I participated in what they call a “24-hour breastfeeding window” to try to teach Max to breastfeed once the tubes were out. You stay at the hospital for as long as you can for 24 hours, and whenever your baby feeds, you breastfeed him. They had nursing teachers there to help because the coordination of “breathe, suck, swallow” is so intense for preemie babies. When we first started, his oxygen dipped because he wasn’t coordinating properly. He turned blue so many times.

But as he was starting to breastfeed, that’s when his personality came out. When he was first born, he was red because his skin was not even in yet — it was translucent, almost. But when we started breastfeeding, he was looking up at me and holding my breast and then pushing away from it and then coming back at it. And that’s when I was like, Oh my God, this is a real person.

We were in the hospital until Max was the equivalent of 38-weeks gestation. It was December 18, 2024. We spent the holidays at our house, and it was amazing. We had all these new Christmas ornaments for the baby, and our family from Portland and Hong Kong came over. It was a really beautiful holiday.

On January 6, my parents were in town from New York, and my husband was getting ready to fly to Boston for a business trip. That night, the wind was howling. We have a big stone-pine tree by the corner of our house, and we’ve always been worried that it could fall on the house. So I thought, We need to get out of here. 

First thing in the morning, we booked two hotel rooms at the Santa Anita racetrack for a one-night stay, and my husband got an Uber to the airport. That whole morning, we watched the news about the Palisades fire and how traumatizing and absolutely batshit crazy that was. Then that evening, my parents and I were hanging out at the hotel — my dad was feeding the baby a bottle — and my mom opened the curtain to look out the window. We had a gorgeous panoramic view of the mountains, but that night the view was sickening. We were front and center, staring at what was happening. “Is that a fire?” my mom asked. And then we were all like, “Isn’t that Altadena?”

As the night progressed, the fire started going up the mountain, down the mountain, and then splitting into two and coming down the mountain all the way. I was scared out of my mind, wondering, Is this going to come all the way down here to this racetrack? Eventually we fell asleep. My husband was in a panic, but what were we going to do? At least he was safe in Boston. And we were safe where we were.

By the time we woke up in the morning, it looked like the fire was still spreading — it just looked terrifying, and we thought, Oh my God, we need to get out of here. So I called my cousin who lives in Laguna, in Orange County, and said, “We’re coming down.”

We stayed with my cousins for a week. And then both of my kids came down with RSV. I ended up back in the hospital with the baby for about four or five days. A week, ten days went by, and we didn’t know if our house had burned because we couldn’t get back there. Everything was blockaded. Then the information slowly started trickling in. But even after our neighbor to the right of us called and said, “Hey, I was just up there — it’s gone,” we struggled to believe it. We were like, “What do you mean? Gone?” You’re still assuming that it’s not completely gone. It just does not compute. All my daughter’s equipment burned — every single bit of it.

We headed back to Los Angeles to be close to my daughter’s school, and we stayed in a hotel for three weeks. It was a cool location, basically in Chinatown, so there was really good food. And then something amazing happened: A wheelchair that we had had fitted for our daughter months earlier — that had been delayed due to issues with insurance — was finally delivered. Had we gotten that wheelchair two weeks earlier, it would’ve burned in the fire. But it came while we were in the hotel, and it’s amazing. She feels so confident in it.

And Max, he was very easy through all of this. When he was supposed to be “adjusted 1 month,” he was acting like a 3-month-old. The state provides early-intervention therapists, and they came by and evaluated him and they were like, “He’s doing so good! We can’t even give you services at this point!” He will eventually receive physical and occupational therapy, but he’s very different from my first child. But they’re both perfect.

Our whole community has been amazing — the NICU-mom community and our daughter’s school community. The school’s been unbelievable, just bringing us everything we need and more.

It’s been a little weird for me, actually, because when Sophie had her seizure as a baby, I kind of went into hiding. When all your friends have babies at the same time and something happens to your child, it’s very hard. She had brain surgery, and I gave up all social media. I gave up socializing. I kind of retreated. I had no capacity.

But because of the fires, I’ve been forced to be open about our life, and everyone finally knows that Sophie has special needs. I feel like the fire burned our house and our entire neighborhood, but it also burned the burden of hiding. Now, I’m like, “Everyone, she’s in a wheelchair. She’s awesome. She’s in a really great school. We’re not lacking in any department.”

When we finally put the kids in the car and drove by our house and saw that it was all gone, we were like, Holy shit. Altadena’s gone, gone, gone. But we have this great view. So as soon as we drove up, the first thing we saw was our view, and we were like, Okay. We’re definitely rebuilding. There’s no question about it.

We will be smarter about the materials we use. We’ve been talking to people who are giving us really great ideas, like steel frames and fire-resistant concrete. I’m not sure what the timeline will be like. First, the EPA had to clear out all the toxic stuff, and now we’re waiting for the City of Los Angeles to do the cleanup. It will probably be at least three years before we can move back.

Yesterday, we went up to a beautiful hiking trail in Eaton Canyon. When it rains a lot, there’s a waterfall there. It’s breathtaking. Afterward, we decided to drive by the house again, but we took a different route: the canyon route. And I was so surprised to see that all the majestic homes in that part of the community are still there. It made us so happy. We were like, Altadena is not all gone.

After three weeks living in two hotel rooms, we found a rental home, and that’s where we live now. Finding the rental really helped ease my mind about our situation. I know people who have had to move out of state. It’s really hard to find something. And we are not displaced from my daughter’s school. That school is everything, and we’re even closer to it.

The baby is healthy; he’s 11 pounds. So big! And my daughter is healthy. I think that, in our books, losing our home in a fire is a three out of ten as far as hardships. The ten out of ten was Sophie’s health situation. Everything else is a cakewalk.

When stuff with Sophie happened, no one could understand what we were going through. But with the fire, we’re not alone in it. We are going to be fine. And now we get to design the house that we really want to live in. Our house was very accessible before, but now it’s going to be even more so.

Also, I am really thankful that we had the inclination to get the hotel rooms the day before because of the wind. Had we not done that, I think the trauma of leaving would’ve been out of control. But guess what’s still standing? The giant pine tree. That stupid stone pine is still there! We’re like, “Are you kidding me? You didn’t even get scorched!” It’s clearly not falling — ever.

The names of the subjects have been changed to protect their identities. 

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