CHAPEL HILL -- The doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center assured Susan Williamson that she could be discharged on the Saturday after her Wednesday surgery, and she wanted nothing better than to be home, in Holly Springs.

But Susan felt horrible. Her uterus had been opened so that surgeons could repair the spina bifida lesion on her unborn child -- an experimental procedure she endured to give her baby, Anna, an opportunity for a more normal life.

The incision on Susan's belly stretched from pelvic bone to pelvic bone -- a big, diabolical smile she would wear forever -- and it hurt terribly.

Two days after the surgery, she could scarcely walk. She got out of the hospital bed once on Thursday, twice on Friday, but it wasn't really walking. Susan shuffled, hunched over, carrying her belly like a load of eggs collected in an apron.

Then, on Saturday, when a nurse examined Susan's incision, it didn't appear to be closing correctly. The nurse looked closer to see whether there was any mending at all, and the incision broke open from one end to the other as easily as a souffle.

There was nothing to do but pack it with gauze, through layers of skin and fat, and let it heal that way; suturing or stitching would have sealed in bacteria and triggered a massive infection. Nurses taught Susan's husband, Jason, how to pull out -- carefully, slowly -- the bloody bandages deep in his wife's wound and pack new ones, twice a day.

The incision kept Susan in the hospital an extra day, but it also pushed everyone's spirits low.

Although they won a discharge on Sunday, making their flight to Raleigh-Durham, the Williamsons arrived physically and emotionally spent. Their first night back, Susan struggled to find comfort amid the pain. Neither of them slept.

Susan's worst moments were when she monitored for contractions, fixing a sensory device the size of a portable CD player to her belly. For an hour, she was forced to sit motionless. Afterward, she hooked the device to a communicator, which fed the data over phone lines to nurses in Tennessee, who read the reports.

Every day, the nurses reported that Susan was registering too many contractions, that she needed to monitor again, that she required additional dosages of the muscle relaxant injected through a pump on her hip. Four contractions an hour. More drugs. Five an hour. They came and came.

Finally, on Thursday, May 25, the nurses urged Susan to get in touch with her local doctors. So Susan dialed Dr. Nancy Chescheir's office in Chapel Hill. The order was clear: Get to the hospital.

Just that day, Jason had gone back to work after missing two weeks. Susan's younger sister, Martha, who had flown in from New Jersey to help out, bustled Susan into the car and sped to UNC Hospitals.

Anna was only 23-and-a-half weeks along and, in the terminology of medical science, nonviable.

Pained, tired and worried, Susan allowed a question that had crossed her mind more than once since she returned from Vanderbilt.

"Oh," Susan thought, "what have we done?"

So much to worry about

Susan was anxious, in part because she hadn't been able to talk with Chescheir, an obstetrician at UNC Hospitals who specialized in high-risk pregnancies. In the few days that the Williamsons had been back from Vanderbilt, they hadn't even had a chance to schedule a visit with Chescheir to become established as her patient.

Now Chescheir was away, so when Susan got to the hospital, she was visited by a number of doctors, many curious about the procedure she'd gone through. The doctors ran tests to make sure Susan wasn't in labor and then pumped her full of a different medicine to calm her uterus.

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