Baby gives Lexington couple confidence

Joe Di Lullo
| Special to the Mansfield News Journal

LEXINGTON — Imagine naming your baby girl Mia without knowing whether she would survive the pregnancy.

Meet your neighbors and longtime Richland County residents, Grayson and Lori Murray.

The couple were already parents to Vera when they went on vacation to Florida over Christmas last year. Throughout the vacation, Grayson kept teasing Lori that she was pregnant because they had just had Vera. She eventually took a pregnancy test, and it came back positive. They were very happy about the news.

Six or seven weeks into her pregnancy, Lori started having cramps. The doctors decided to do an ultrasound to make sure everything was okay.

“We had a heartbeat, everything seemed fine – except they found some abnormalities with my placenta,” Lori said.

The doctors ordered further tests. They were preparing the couple for a non-viable pregnancy. The news that came was still unexpected.

“They described what’s called a partial molar pregnancy, which is extremely rare,” Grayson said.

In a partial molar pregnancy, the baby will receive twice as many chromosomes.

“Basically, the baby doesn’t survive more than 15 weeks in the womb,” Lori explains.

The couple Googled “partial molar pregnancy” and their ultrasound looked just like the search results: a bunch of grapes. Doctors suggested another ultrasound to be sure.

It was worse.

“We were diagnosed with a partial molar pregnancy, which was our worst nightmare,” Grayson said.

The next step

After their baby’s diagnosis, the couple was heartbroken. According to some of the doctors they consulted, the next step was to undergo a dilation and curettage, a surgical procedure that involves scraping tissue from inside the uterus.

But their OhioHealth ob-gyn, James Alford, wanted another ultrasound.

“Our doctor was great,” Lori said. “He said, ‘We’re not going to rush into this right now. I have to be 100 percent sure because this baby’s heart is beating.’”

Alford saved Mia’s life.

“He’s been a great advocate for us,” Lori added, while other vendors have said “that’s just the way it is.”

A renewed faith

Grayson and Lori believed in God but did not attend church regularly.

“A coworker of mine at school told me about a healer at the Fusion Church in Lexington named Reverend El Akuchie,” Grayson noted. “He was our Hail Mary.”

Akuchie called that night. Originally from Nigeria, he prayed fervently over the phone for Mia in his native language.

“He was screaming passionately on the phone, ‘Mia’s going to be born, Mia’s going to be born,'” Grayson said. “Toward the end of the call, he said, ‘God spoke to me: Mia’s going to be born.'”

Grayson and Lori still had 24 to 48 hours until their next ultrasound.

They relied on their faith and tried to be sure that their baby would be born. Their anxiety encroached on their prayers.

The final exam results were conclusive. Alford entered the room with good news for the couple: the exam results indicated that the baby was healthy.

“She (Lori) was a normal patient,” Grayson said. “And the grape cluster they saw on our scan was just gone. It was a normal fetus.”

“We went to church that night and prayed again to thank God. It was an incredible moment,” he added.

There was still one more challenge. Mia was born with two knots in her umbilical cord, and it wrapped around her neck twice. Today, Lori says, Mia is “very, very healthy and stocky — a healthy 10-month-old” who just got her first tooth.

The couple’s love story

The proud parents are longtime residents of Richland County. Grayson is from Shelby, where he works as a high school English teacher, while Lori is from Lexington, where she works part-time as a dental hygienist, allowing her to be home with their children. The couple met in 2019 and married in 2020.

They strongly believe in community involvement.

“We try to help the community as much as we can and give our girls a fun and positive life,” Grayson said.

They enjoy going on family bike rides around the village.

“We don’t want anyone to be hurt or discouraged by our story if things didn’t turn out the way they did for us,” Grayson said. “We feel it’s our responsibility to share our story with as many people as possible.”

“I told God we would be devout, practicing Christians for life if He could save Mia,” Grayson said. “We go to Fusion every Sunday since then. Lori works in daycare, I play in the band; the girls go every Sunday. We’re regulars.”

Meet Your Neighbor is a weekly series profiling residents of Richland County and the surrounding area. Correspondent Joe Di Lullo can be reached at muckrack.com/dilulloj or [email protected].