From the wreath on the door of their new Whitefish home to the beautifully decorated Christmas tree, Carl and Ashley McDermott, their daughter Sophie and baby son Cade seem to have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell magazine portrait.

They have much to celebrate after both baby Cade and his mother lived through his premature birth last spring that could have taken both their lives. She savored watching Cade and Sophie open their gifts at an early celebration with her in-laws.

“Christmas is so much better with kids,” she said. “You see the magic of it through their eyes.”

As Ashley, 34, bounced 9-month-old Cade on her knee, she reflected on the miracle that allowed them to survive after she went into labor 12 weeks early. 

Just as she was lifted onto the operating table for a Caesarean section, Ashley said, her uterus ruptured.

“I had three or four doctors say that it was a miracle that we both survived,”  Ashley said. “If they had waited one more minute, we both would have died.”

Married eight years ago, Carl and Ashley dated for seven years while completing undergraduate and graduate work. The two met at Pepperdine University where he studied accounting and she majored in education.

“I grew up in Portland and he’s from Shelby,” she said. “We knew we wanted to live in Montana.”

They moved to Whitefish for the many recreational opportunities and nice family environment. Ashley said they needed a place within commuting distance of Shelby, where Carl works for his father’s accounting firm some days and telecommutes other days from home. 

“I taught for five years at Glacier Gateway,” she said.

When her daughter was born, she left her job to stay at home. Sophie also was born six weeks premature and came home after 16 days in intensive care.

“That experience went so well, I thought I could have another,” Ashley said.

As a kidney transplant recipient in her early 20s, she said she was considered a high-risk pregnancy. She was born with just one kidney that began to fail 10 years ago.

“My mom donated her kidney to me,” Ashley said.

Her mother, Shari Johnson, played a role in saving her life again because she was staying with Ashley when she woke up feeling like she was coming down with the flu on March 22. Up to that point, her pregnancy had gone well without even a trace of morning sickness.

“I woke up with stomach cramps,” Ashley recalled. “That progressed to where I could no longer walk. It got to where I had full contractions.”

Her husband was out of town that day, so she would have been alone and possibly delayed in getting to North Valley Hospital.

“My mom drove me to the emergency room and they started doing an ultrasound,” she said. 

Her husband burned up the highway between Whitefish and Shelby, arriving 10 minutes before the action began.

After examining her and the imaging, the emergency room personnel called her obstetrician Dr. Randy Beach and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Kalispell Regional Medical Center for a baby transport team of NICU specialist Mindy Fuzesy and neonatologist Dr. Marshall Dressel.

Fuzesy said the normal routine of calling an ambulance to pick them up would have taken too long, so they jumped into Dressel’s car and raced to North Valley Hospital. They arrived in the operating room just as Beach was about to start the C-section. 

“Once they opened her up, they found her uterus had ruptured and the baby out of the uterus and free floating in the abdomen,” Fuzesy said. “That’s really bad. A lot of those babies do not survive.”

Under those circumstances, she said, the mother may bleed to death and the baby may die from no blood flow and a non-functioning placenta. Beach quickly delivered the baby to the team, then expertly tended to Ashley so she pulled through and healed quickly.

“The right people were in place to take care of the baby with the right equipment,” Fuzesy said. “The baby had been intubated, had an umbilical line in place, had had surfactant through the endotracheal tube — all for resuscitation by the time he was 13 minutes old.”

Before leaving Kalispell, Fuzesy and Dressel had asked a co-worker to call for the ambulance to meet them at North Valley Hospital with a transport isolette.

“By the time we were resuscitated in the operating room, the ambulance was there,” Fuzesy said. “We were able to safely move the baby to the transport isolette and bring him here to Kalispell.”

Cade came out weighing two pounds, 15 ounces and was 14 inches long. At 28 weeks, the preemie was considered on the large side.

“He was teeny, tiny,” Ashley said.

After two days recovering at North Valley Hospital, she joined her baby at Kalispell Regional. After two more days, she had to go home without her new baby.

It’s difficult for any mom, but Ashley knew her little girl needed to see her at home and healthy.

“Sophie had a real hard time. She saw me in a lot of pain,” she said. “She stopped taking and eating. It was pretty traumatic for her.”

Cade put in 75 days in the intensive-care unit under the care of Dressel and neonatologist Dr. Judy Rigby. His adventures continued with a laser eye operation common among preemies and a week’s stay at Seattle Children’s Hospital for testing for a twisted bowel. 

He got a clean bill of health there and returned to the Kalispell Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

“We were so glad to be back. Kalispell felt like home,” she said. “The nurses hugged us. I have a soft spot for Dr. Rigby. She’s wonderful.”

When Cade was discharged, the couple brought him home to the new house in Whitefish that the couple had planned to move into the weekend following the Thursday Ashley went to the emergency room. Cade came home with mandatory oxygen and a monitor but was off them in just a month.

With plump, rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes and a happy and curious manner, Cade looks like the bundle of joy that Rockwell might paint as the all-American baby.

“He’s doing wonderfully,” Ashley said. “He hit all the milestones that he’s supposed to. He just learned to sit up on his own.”

She described him as a mellow baby who has just begun to interact with big sister Sophie. She loves to make him laugh, which he does readily as a good-natured boy who sleeps all through the night. 

The couple named him Cade because they liked the name and found it appropriate for a baby who fought the good fight and lived.

“It means warrior,” she said. “We thought that was cool.”

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.