The Dreaded Due Date

Today could have been the happiest of my life. Instead I am drinking my full strength coffee while I pay medical bills, I received that horrible ‘your baby is home’ due date discount email, and received the final autopsy report on our baby. Nothing says ‘No happy ending’ like getting kicked while you’re down. I find myself thinking ‘what if’ kind of scenarios or ‘if only’ thoughts and have to steer away because you can’t change the past. No amount of wishful thinking will make today anything other than what it is. Sad.

I feel like it would help if I knew I was pregnant again. But I don’t. I'm still in the ‘optimum week’ which means no testing till end of May at the earliest and even then no guarantees. The day I get a tiny little plus on that pee-stick is the day I probably have a mini breakdown. As most Moms-without-their-babies know… it will bring up all the insecurities and the terror that it will happen again. I don’t think I could handle losing another child late in the pregnancy. It’s hard to trust in flukes, and only a 1% chance of recurrence when I have been on the losing end of statistics before. It won’t cheer me up to say that 2.03 per 10000 births are affected by ABS (nailed it). Even fewer cases of banding cause death (lucky me). And 1 in 200 women experience a still birth (oh snap). So I seem to have won the crap-lottery and don’t want to hear about slim chances. My entire experience was a slim chance. Not only will low statistics not cheer me up, it will give me something else to worry about. Like I learned that if you have a child with a cleft there is a higher chance of having it happen again. Great. 

Now that I’m starting to get sarcastic, I know it’s time to wrap this misery train up.

I miss you my little man. I looked forward to today for 7 months, but you left early. But I’ll love you forever and ever because you are the only one who knows what my heart sounds like from the inside.

Ps. Ask God to give you a brother or sister soon. But make sure to tell Him that you want your sibling to stay down here with your parents and not up there with you yet. Boy or girl... you pick.  Mom and Dad love you tons. Give Dooley (now your dog) a kiss from me. 

Mom

Friday News

Finally. A doctor that is willing to work with us this is GOOD news! She listened to our concerns and put me on prescription strength folic acid and recommended continuing with my regular prenatals as well. I guess carrying Max to 27 weeks is good news in regards to everything because she and the other doctors she talked to didn’t think aspirin or any other interventions were necessary. 

Side Note: Our genetic counselor just called and the final autopsy confirms amniotic band syndrome. Which is good news I guess because the chances of it repeating are very very very low.

Other than the medical side, life is good. My mom went back east and that was sad but now hubby and I can sleep and recover! (and possibly work on baby #2!).. well ntnp-ing

And I bought levis jeans for 7 dollars today. Plus its Friday… is there anything better than a Friday?

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