In April 2024, Jamye Willé, EdD, associate director for Leadership, Outreach and Training for Student Care Coordination at Vanderbilt University, was 32 years old, pregnant with her first child and both nervous and excited. She always wanted to be a mother and waited until she and her husband felt ready to have a family.
“I went to school for 10 years, got my doctorate and wanted to be in a place where we felt stable, knowing it was a bit later than some of our peers and beyond the expectations of some people in our family,” she said.
Making plans helped her feel in control: She saw an OB-GYN provider at Vanderbilt Health One Hundred Oaks and chose Vanderbilt Birth Center to have as natural an experience possible. That’s where she received her ultrasounds and prenatal care, and where she noticed a flyer for the inaugural Celebration of Motherhood event.
“The goal of this community-facing event is to celebrate the courage and beauty of motherhood,” said Rolanda Lister, MD, event organizer and assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Meharry are partnering to deliver an unforgettable experience for expectant and postpartum mothers in Nashville.”
This year’s Celebration of Motherhood event is Saturday, April 12.
When Willé arrived with her mother at the Cal Turner Family Center at Meharry Medical College that Saturday last year, she decided to climb the stairs to the second floor where the event was being held.
“I thought, ‘I’m pregnant but I’m feeling healthy. I’m going to take the stairs,’” she said. “When I got to the top, there was a blood pressure monitor station hosted by Vanderbilt Heart Health. My mom said I needed to have my blood pressure checked and, though I’d never had prior issues with blood pressure at all, I said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’”
Willé’s blood pressure was elevated and the provider, who looked concerned, wrote down her reading so Willé could share it at her Vanderbilt Birth Center appointment the following Monday. Willé enjoyed the rest of the event, scoring “substantial and meaningful” giveaways including free diapers and a sleeper blanket, stroller wagon and car seat.
When she got home, Willé checked her blood pressure with a cuff, thinking walking those stairs may have elevated her blood pressure temporarily. It was still high. She called the midwives at Vanderbilt Birth Center, and they told her to come in for fluid samples. Everything came back normal: Her kidney and liver function looked good, and there was no protein in her urine that would indicate preeclampsia, a serious blood pressure condition that’s dangerous for both mother and baby.
Her blood pressure was still high when she went back to the birth center on Monday. They told her she was too high risk to continue with her birth plan of delivering there, and she was referred back to her OB-GYN provider.
The next day, when she spoke with the OB-GYN office, she mentioned having a headache.
“I thought it was because my entire birth plan changed,” Willé said. “That led to me going to triage later that week. They didn’t keep me but said I needed two appointments a week for the rest of my pregnancy — one for baby monitoring and one for a blood pressure check — plus one every other week with my OB. I was five months pregnant at that point and understood you don’t typically have frequent appointments like that until you’re really close to your due date.”
That Friday at work, Willé felt lightheaded. She’d left her blood pressure cuff at home, and her gut told her to get checked out. She walked across campus to Occupational Health in the Medical Arts building, where she was encouraged to go to triage. Willé’s blood pressure continued to rise, and she was admitted to the hospital.
“I was in disbelief initially. At first, my mindset was: This isn’t my story. This is a blip on the situation. I moved into confusion and then helplessness pretty quickly,” she said. “The hardest thing for my husband and me to wrap our minds around with preeclampsia was the ‘cure’ is delivery. The symptom I experienced was high blood pressure. It wasn’t like the issue was high blood pressure, and I needed to exercise or have a low-sodium diet. It was like a world warp to be in a situation where all I could do was be calm and still and take my blood pressure medication.”
Medication wasn’t helping bring her blood pressure down, so Willé’s labs were sent to the Mayo Clinic for a specialized test that looks for a specific hormone in the placenta that indicates severe preeclampsia.
“The threshold for the test is 45, and my number was 74,” Willé said. “They put me on a protocol for taking my vitals every four hours, limiting my activity to walking around the hospital floor. At that point I was 24 weeks pregnant. The NICU told me they have the best outcomes with babies 28 weeks and older, so the goal was to stay pregnant as long as possible.
“I don’t know how I would’ve discovered I had preeclampsia with the symptom of high blood pressure had I not attended the Celebration of Motherhood.”
The day she was 28 weeks pregnant, Willé noticed she wasn’t feeling the baby move as much, and her blood pressure had spiked. In an effort to save her maternity days for after the baby was born, she was working from her hospital bed, running an interview via Zoom with her camera off, when doctors came in to say they were concerned. Her blood pressure rose and stabilized a few times over the course of the day and Willé was eventually moved to Labor and Delivery.
Her daughter, Akemi, was born at 3 a.m. on May 21 by emergency cesarean section. The new family of three was in the NICU for 89 days afterward at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt.
“Akemi was diagnosed with bronchial pulmonary dysplasia, which meant she required oxygen. She had a heart procedure, required a feeding tube and had jaundice,” Willé said. “The first week was very much like survival mode, trusting our medical team and hoping and praying that she would pull through.”
Today Akemi is “a preemie and very much a feisty one. She’s a fighter. We have no significant concerns,” said Willé, who will be part of the panel discussion at this year’s Celebration of Motherhood event — the theme of which is “Hear Her.”
“’Hear Her’ means to listen to her story, believe what she’s saying, explore and treat the symptoms she describes. I felt very lucky and blessed to have the overwhelming majority of my care providers asking me what I thought. Even though sometimes I didn’t know what to think or feel, I felt valued, considered and included in my care process just by being asked,” she said. “You can’t know exactly what will happen, but there’s value in sharing stories like this because pregnancy can be much more dynamic than the parties, clothes, hopes and dreams you have around it.”
