After difficult pregnancies, mom says she’s set to advocate for natural births

Dawson Michel’s lungs weren’t getting enough air.

Born more than a month too soon and still less than a month old, doctors had to force air down a tube in Dawson’s throat to help him breathe, one in a battery of procedures meant to keep him and his twin sister Adelaide alive for the two weeks spent inside Summerlin Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

It was around that time that Crystal Michel, Adelaide and Dawson’s mother and a North Las Vegas resident, began to feel, of all things, relief.

Under NICU supervision, doctors had given her twins a 98 percent chance of survival. Had the pair been born a few weeks earlier, that number would have plummeted to 3 percent.

“I was high risk for cervical incompetence and other issues,” Michel said. “I visited the Summerlin ER twice a week for, like, four weeks, and they finally said they’re healthy enough that they can go ahead and come, and you’re sick enough that we need to take them.”

Michel shuttled breast milk back and forth to Summerlin Hospital twice a day to feed the twins naturally.

“It was very scary,” she added.

The twins, now 4 months old, already stand half as tall as Michel’s firstborn daughter Katelyn, who was born with a rare form of dwarfism doctors took years to diagnose.

“That was a nightmare,” Michel said. “The doctors kept telling me I was just a concerned mom and that nothing was wrong.

“It was finally diagnosed by a radiologist. He found her bone age, at 13 months old, was that of a 6-month-old.”

Less than seven years after undergoing an emergency C-section to allow for Katelyn’s birth and after months spent saving to pay for fertility treatments, Michel was again pregnant, this time with twins.

Husband Brent Michel, an Air Force staff sergeant, remembers hearing the news.

“My mouth dropped,” the 29-year-old father said. “I was floored.

“A few months before that we thought adoption was our only option.”

Both Michel parents recall 7-year-old Katelyn donning full scrubs just to be able to touch her twin siblings over long hours spent at the NICU. Neither regretted the decision to opt for a second pregnancy over adoption.

Despite the risks and despite Crystal’s pregnancy history, the couple have even talked about adding to the clan.

“I love being a mom,” Crystal Michel said. “I’m only 27, so I think in the next two to three years we’ll come to a verdict.”

For now, she remains a mother of three, on track to graduate from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas with a master’s degree in public health.

By this time next Mother’s Day, she hopes to put that degree to work helping other moms get through one of the few things she hasn’t: a natural birth.

“I want to be an administrator and make some changes to birthing rights for women,” Michel said. “I want to advocate for the Bradley Method — husband-coached natural childbirth — and other forms of natural birth.

“I feel like women don’t get a lot of choices. We didn’t, but we’re still huge advocates for natural alternatives for everyone else.”

Contact Centennial and North Las Vegas View reporter James DeHaven at jdehaven@viewnews.com or 702-477-3839.