When Three Became Two

Starting a blog. Something I have done many times, yet never stuck with. Hopefully this time will be different. I’ve been toying with the idea for a month. I need an outlet. I need to be able to put all my thoughts and feelings down, rather than hold them in because they are sad and a reminder of everything. Nobody wants to hear the 28 sad quotes that encompass what I feel. However in blog-land, you are an anonymous captive audience with no choice. 

A little more than a month ago our son died. He was born still at 27 weeks due to what the doctors assume was Amniotic Band Syndrome.

To backtrack a little… I had a textbook pregnancy in the beginning. I was lucky, I didn’t have morning sickness, I didn’t have cravings, and I started feeling my little kickboxer early: at 17 weeks. We went in for our ultrasounds and got all clears from our doctors until our 19 week scan. That one we went in and the tech didn’t mention anything except that he was a boy, but sent the first wave of problems to our doctor to tell us in person. (techs can’t tell you anything). After Christmas we went in and our doctor told us it looked like our baby might have a cleft lip or palate. We thought it was an isolated event. That we could handle surgery for him and be ok. We weren’t even sure, the tech didn’t get a good look at his face he kept his hand over it. (now in hindsight I know the tech was desperate to see his lip, I had thought at the time that because it was taking so long, she just wanted us to be able to look at him longer and she wanted to give us pictures.) We were scheduled to go in to see a perinatologist within the month to confirm the diagnosis and put us in touch with teams.

It took us a couple weeks from being shell shocked to come to terms and start looking at next steps. By that point our happy-pregnancy bubble had been burst and we were no longer naïve parents who expect all rainbows and unicorns with their babies.  But a lip we could handle. We could even handle a palate. I wore treads in google and cleft forums looking for good doctors and paths. I had been mourning my ideal baby daydream, and had pretty much said goodbye to breastfeeding without a bottle and started acclimating to scars and surgery.

One day, the day before his big appointment, he just stopped moving and I knew. We went in expecting the worst. It was confirmed when the tech put the wand on my belly and then after several seconds asked when the last time he moved was. From there it was straight to the hospital to induce and deliver our tiny little man.

It’s been almost 6 weeks today.

“If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was ‘over’ it. They would ask me how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breath and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never going to be the life I had before.” -Elizabeth Edwards