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Author Insight
Neale's Name, Neale's Heart
In Breathless Haste: Finding God in Our Ordinary Life, we share thirty stories of how we’ve experienced God—in both the everyday and the miraculous. After the loss of our firstborn son following heart surgery, we were both excited and anxious to be expecting a baby girl. In this story, we share why we chose the name Neale before she was born—and how we later learned the devastating news about her unhealthy heart while she was still in utero. In the book, we tell the full story of walking through those dark months of pregnancy, delivering her into the hands of NICU doctors—and then witnessing a miracle.
Book Excerpt
Breathless Haste
We named her Neale Covington after my great-aunt who left her small town of Florence, South Carolina, as a young woman to become a missionary in Nigeria. She served from 1920 to 1961. We loved that our daughter would share the name of a strong, fearless, and courageous Christian woman. A few months later, we went back for another ultrasound as part of monitoring Neale throughout her fetal development. This study revealed that the left side of Neale’s heart was smaller than the right side. The fetal/pediatric cardiologist explained that the left side of the heart was the pumping chamber for the heart and that it was normally larger than the right side. Neale’s heart measured in the 5th percentile on the left, while the right side measured in the 95th percentile. This large discrepancy indicated a diagnosis of a hypoplastic left heart. The cardiologist also noticed an aortic coarctation, which is a narrowing of the aorta that forces the heart to pump harder in order to move and circulate her blood.
“Our hopes were gone. We were devastated.”
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