Meet Your Neighbor: Lexington's Murrays share their testimony after challenging pregnancy

LEXINGTON — Imagine naming your baby girl Mia but not knowing if she would survive the pregnancy.

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

The couple were already parents to Vera when they vacationed in Florida during Christmas break last year. Throughout the vacation, Grayson kept teasing Lori about getting pregnant because they had just had Vera. She eventually took a pregnancy test, and it was positive. They were very excited with the news.

Six or seven weeks into the pregnancy, Lori started to cramp. Doctors decided to do a scan to make sure everything was on track.

“We had a heartbeat, everything looked good — except they were seeing some abnormalities with my placenta,” Lori said.

Doctors ordered more scans. They were preparing the couple for a nonviable pregnancy. The news that came was still unexpected.

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

In a partial molar pregnancy, a baby will get twice the number of chromosomes.

“Basically, the baby doesn’t make it past 15 weeks in the womb,” said Lori.

The couple Googled "partial molar pregnancy" and their scan looked like the search results — a cluster of grapes. Doctors suggested another scan to make sure.

It was worse.

“We got the diagnosis of partial molar pregnancy — which was our worst nightmare,” said Grayson.

The next step

After their baby was diagnosed, the couple was heartbroken. Their next step, according to some of the practitioners they saw, was to set up a D&C (dilation and curettage) — a surgical procedure that involves scraping tissue from the inside of the uterus.

But their obstetrics/gynecology doctor at OhioHealth, James Alford, wanted one more scan.

“Our doctor was amazing,” said Lori. "He said 'we’re not going to jump on this right away — I need to be 100% positive because there’s a heartbeat on this baby.”

Alford saved Mia’s life.

“He was a big advocate for us,” added Lori, whereas other providers wrote it off as “that’s what it is.”

A renewed faith

Grayson and Lori believed in God but weren’t regular churchgoers.

“One of my coworkers at school told me about a healer at Fusion Church in Lexington named Revevred El Akuchie," Grayson noted. “It was our Hail Mary."

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

“He was very passionately yelling through the phone — "Mia will be born, Mia will be born," Grayson explained. “Towards the end of the call, he said ‘God spoke to me — Mia will be born.’”

Grayson and Lori still had 24 to 48 hours before their next scan.

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

The results of the final scan were conclusive. Alford walked into the room with good news for the couple — the scan results indicated that the baby was healthy.

“She (Lori) was a regular patient," Grayson said. "And the cluster of grapes that they saw in our scan, they were just gone. It was a regular-looking fetus."

"We went into the church that night and prayed again for thanks. It was just an incredible moment," he added.

There was still another challenge ahead. Mia was born with two knots in her umbilical cord and it was wrapped around her neck twice. Today, according to Lori, Mia is “very, very healthy and chunky — a thriving 10-month-old" who just got her first tooth.

The couple's love story

The proud parents are lifelong residents of Richland County; Grayson is a native of 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 kids. The couple met in 2019 and married in 2020.

They are firm believers in community outreach.

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

They enjoy taking family bike rides around the village.

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

“I did tell God that we would be dedicated, practicing Christians for life” if He could save Mia," Grayson said. “Since then, we go to Fusion every Sunday. Lori works in the nursery, I play in the band; the girls are there every Sunday. We’re regulars.”

Meet Your Neighbor is a weekly series profiling people in Richland County and surrounding areas. Correspondent Joe Di Lullo can be reached at muckrack.com/dilulloj or jp.dilullo0926@gmail.com .

This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Meet Your Neighbor: Lexington's Murrays share their testimony after challenging pregnancy