My Story--The Day My World Changed

The only way to properly tell my story is to go back past the very beginning.  When my husband, Andy, and I were first married, we decided that we wanted to start a family right away.  I envisioned having three kids; he wanted two.  About two months after the wedding, we decided to start trying to have a baby.  And a painfully long 15 months later, after numerous medical tests all coming back normal and just a month before we were about to try fertility drugs, it finally happened.  It was so difficult to conceive that I spent a lot of time worrying about a miscarriage or a genetic defect.  We celebrated every little milestone of the pregnancy.  My mom even threw me a fetus party when I reached 10 weeks and a viability party at 30 weeks.  We took pictures of my growing belly every 2 weeks throughout the whole pregnancy.  I read every "what to expect" book and "what your baby can do now" book multiple times.  I could tell you to the day how far along I was in the pregnancy.  We settled on a name just 2 weeks after finding out it was going to be a girl.  I shopped and shopped for just the right nursery decor and everything else on my registry.  I wanted to make everything perfect, like any new mother.  I was so in tune to everything and I couldn't keep anything to myself.  I told my mom and my husband about every little thing...my first leg cramps, the first kicks, my first Braxton-Hicks contractions.  And, in July 2009, I gave birth, albeit 15 days late, to a beautiful baby girl, Whitney.

She is every mother's dream child--bright, loving, easy-going, and as a baby, very portable.   To this day, I describe her as "the best kid ever."  We took her everywhere with us, fancy restaurants included, and she was always content.  Her one issue--they all have at least one--was that she was not a good sleeper.  I didn't get a full night's sleep until after her 1st birthday.  I used to drive to work everyday saying, "Stay awake.  Don't close your eyes" for the entire 40 minute commute there and the 40 minutes back.  It took me literally 18 months to recover from my pregnancy and not feel like a zombie.  My husband wanted to have our kids close together, but I was so tired, I just couldn't allow that to happen.  Finally around her 2nd birthday, after having 6 months of more sleeping through the night than not, I decided that we could try again, because after all, I figured we were looking at at least another year before I actually got pregnant again, and by then, I'd surely be up to the task.  But as luck would have it, I got pregnant on our first try.

It happened so fast that I wasn't worried at all about a miscarriage in the first trimester.  I just thought it was so easy, we'll just try again if it doesn't take. No big deal.  At 10 weeks, we had fetus party, but we hadn't taken any pictures of my belly.  At 17 weeks, I felt movement, but offhandedly mentioned it to my husband and my mom a couple days later.  I read the books, but a month at a time, and I couldn't ever remember how far along I was.  Every few weeks, I would get out the calendar and count it out again.  It wasn't that I wasn't excited about having a baby--I was.  Focusing on myself was just further down the priority list.  But that's often how it goes with a second pregnancy.  You've got other things to focus on, like your toddler.  

And then at 30 weeks, we decided to postpone the viability party, as my mom was going out of town.  On viability day, a Friday, I drove to her house to take her to the airport.  I grabbed her suitcase, and she said, "Don't you lift that.  You're pregnant."  To which I replied, "But she's viable.  Nothing's going to happen now."  And as any good daughter would do, I listened to her and didn't lift the suitcase.  I drove her to the airport and told her in the car that Andy and I finally settled on a name, Miri.

Two days later, on Sunday afternoon, I felt a pinching or cramping as I was driving down the highway, and that was the last feeling I had.  I had no kicking the rest of the day.  We went to a play that evening, and the loud music always made Whitney and Miri kick, but this time it didn't.  I kind of knew something was wrong and I cried that night while laying in bed.  But, my mind said "she's viable...she's fine.  Probably just a lazy sleeping day.  Let's see what tomorrow brings."

Monday morning...no movement.  Pushing on my sides didn't do it either.  Then I remembered that I had read in your 6th month, the heartbeat is strong enough to hear through a stethoscope.  So that afternoon, I borrowed a stethoscope, put it to my belly, and listened.  Nothing.  I moved it around and still silence.  I got a little nervous, but then I put it to my chest, and again, nothing.  That was relieving...the stethoscope was broken!  So, I decided to call my OB and see if he'd let me come in for reassurance, but the office had closed for the day.  Laying in bed that night, I was focusing really hard on trying to feel some movement.  I wasn't sure if she was moving or not.  Each time I rolled over, she tumbled around, so I felt something, but she wasn't doing anything when I was still.  Maybe our timing was just coinciding...that's what I kept telling myself.

Tuesday morning came and still nothing.  I called my OB and they suggested I go to the hospital.  My daughter had a gymnastics class at 10:00, so I figured I'd go after the class.  I didn't want her to miss out on her activities, and my mom was out-of-town and couldn't take her, and my dad had planned on coming part way through the class to watch, and I didn't want to cancel that either.  I figured if it was good news, no problem waiting.  If it was bad news, an extra hour wouldn't change anything.  Before we left the house for the day, I packed a bag of things to keep Whitney entertained at the hospital and then we left for the gym.  She had fun tumbling and showing off for her grandpa.  Afterwards, I decided that we should eat before going to the hospital, because who knew how long we'd be waiting.  My dad, Whitney, and I drove to McDonald's (probably--I hate to admit it--the favorite restaurant of all three of us) and had a nice lunch together.    After lunch, my dad left to return to work and Whitney and I went to the hospital.  That was when my world collapsed.

Whitney and I walked into the hospital and were immediately sent to the labor and delivery triage.  We were taken back to a room with a broken curtain, and I remember telling the nurse, "I don't care if it's broken...I don't plan on being here long."  I walked Whitney over to the couch in the room, got a bunch of toys out of her bag and told her to stay on the couch while the nurse looked at me.  I hopped onto the bed and the nurse strapped on a fetal monitor.  Neither of us heard a heartbeat.  But I was still okay, because during my pregnancy with Whitney we didn't always hear her heart on that same type of monitor.  Then the nurse left for a few minutes and when she came back, she brought in an ultrasound machine.  I thought, "Oh good.  I'll get to see her again!"  I love having ultrasounds while pregnant.  It's so much fun seeing your baby instead of just feeling her.  While I was waiting, I went over to Whitney and watched her play on her iPhone which had been generously donated by her grandma just a few weeks earlier.  The nurse returned, I got back onto the bed, and I watched the ultrasound pictures.  This was my 6th ultrasound in two pregnancies, and by now, I could make out the black-and-white features on the screen.  I saw her arms and rib cage.  And then there was her heart, all 4 chambers, but very still.  The nurse told me she would be back and called in a technician.  At this point, I knew.  My fears were true.  I texted my mom and my husband and told them that it wasn't looking good.  The technician brought up the same view, and when I said, "It's not good, is it?", she didn't respond.  She told me that she wanted to call in my OB for a look, and she sent the triage nurse out to make the phone call.  While it was just the technician, my daughter, and me in the room, I started questioning her more.  "You can't find the heartbeat, can you?"  She shook her head.  I took a deep breath, and she stopped searching.  She said that they had a bigger machine to try, but the doctor would have to do it.   My triage nurse came back in and told me that I should call my husband and have him leave work to meet me up here and they'd go get my doctor when he arrived.  It took 20 minutes for him to drive from downtown, and during that time, Whitney climbed off the couch and up onto the bed with me.  She gave my belly a hug, just like she did every night before she went to bed.  She bent over and with the gentlest little touch of her lips, gave it a kiss and said, "I love you baby."  And I wanted to cry, but for her sake I held it in and I gave her the same response I had been giving her every night, "And your baby sister loves you too."  And we cuddled and waited for her daddy to come.

Andy arrived, gave her a hug, and we alerted the nurse that she should call in the doctor.  When the doctor arrived, he said, "Oh Jenny...". We took a look, and he confirmed that Miri was no longer alive.  He told me that if 100 patients came into the hospital without feeling the baby kick for a day, 99 of them get sent back home happy.  I asked him what he thought happened, since I had a completely normal, healthy pregnancy up to that point.  He suggested that perhaps the cord got wound around her neck.  And he told me that if that was the case, she'd be out of oxygen and she would have died within 45 minutes.  But he said that he wouldn't know for sure until he got her out.  We then went through all the details of what was to come.  You'd think, having just learned that your baby died, I would have been spinning, but something came over me--a sense of calm and I was able to pay a lot of attention to details.  "How are you going to get her out?  I'm too far along for a D&C and with Whitney, my old OB made me try to deliver naturally, but after 12 hours of labor and only 1 centimeter dilated, he agreed to perform a c-section.  Am I going to have to go through all that again?"  My doctor, very compassionately said no, that since there was such a high probability of not dilating again, he wouldn't put me through those hours of labor and we'd just do a c-section.  This time I'd get a spinal instead of an epidural.  That made me nervous, having never had that before.  I got all the details of what was going to be done, and I had remembered that with Whitney, they gave me some extra medicine through the epidural while on the operating table, because I hadn't sufficiently numbed up.  "What if that happens again?" I asked, because with the spinal, it's one shot and then removed.  What if I need more medicine?  They told me that they would then have to perform a second spinal in that case.  What about spinal headaches?  I heard they are worse than if you had an epidural.  They assured me that modern spinal headaches are no more common or severe than those caused by an epidural.  I asked if I could donate her cord blood, but they said no since they didn't know exactly what happened.  I showed my doctor my last scar, and explained to him that I tend to keloid, and asked him if he could be careful while sewing this time.  I told them that I had just had lunch and I know you can't have surgery with a full stomach.  They then said they'd schedule me for 6:30 that evening, 6 hours after lunch.   I asked if I could have time to go home and pack, since I really wasn't planning on staying there and being 30 weeks along, it was not quite far enough to have a bag already packed at home.  He said that I couldn't leave and my husband would have to go get everything for me.  They took me into a regular labor and delivery room and out of the triage room, and once settled, I asked Andy to go and get my things.  This is where my calm head failed me...What did he need to pack?  I asked for socks, stretchy clothes, and some maxipads.  I forgot so many things, that he had to make two other trips the next day.  I had him take Whitney while he packed my bags, because I needed some alone time and I needed to let people know what was happening.  I called my mom, and she told me that she was already booked on the first flight home.  She'd be arriving at 8:45 in the morning on Wednesday.  I called my dad and told him to come up to the hospital after work because he'd need to take care of Whitney while Andy and I were in the operating room.  I called my grandmother and while she offered to drop everything and be right there, I really wanted to be alone.  I made her wait about 45 minutes before coming.  And then I called my best friend to tell her the news.  After that, I was done telling people for the day.  I sat, alone in my room, with my thoughts...

This was the way it was meant to be.  I wasn't meant to raise her.  I thought about math...I teach statistics at a local university and I've always loved mathematics, as it controls the world.  I thought about bell curves.  Most things in nature follow a bell curve.  Most of the time, you'll fall in the middle with everyone else.  But every once in a while, you'll be in the tail end of the curve.  And that's normal and expected.  It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.  No one lives their entire life in the middle.  At some point, you'll end up on the fringes.  And so I didn't question "Why me?"  I had my answer...this was just my time to be at the wrong end of the curve.  And that was something I could understand and immediately accept.

But even with that acceptance, I still felt awful.  I apologized to Miri for not being able to protect her.  My womb should have been the safest place for her, and instead, it wasn't.  I knew I didn't do anything wrong.  I ate a healthy diet.  I gave up raw fish and meats, I didn't drink, I limited my caffeine, I ate vitamins everyday.  I didn't fall, I wasn't in an accident.  Nothing struck my belly.  There was nothing that caused this to happen, and therefore, nothing that could have prevented it from happening.  And, if it was the cord, I wouldn't have known in time to race to the hospital, since she often went 45 minutes without moving.  I was lucky that I escaped that source of guilt.  And because I couldn't have stopped what happened to her, I had to accept that this was the way it was meant to be.

I got my IV put in and they took 3 vials of blood through the IV.  The nurse asked me if I knew what or how to explain this to my daughter.  I wasn't sure.  Our dog had died 8 months earlier, and we just explained to her that "The dog died", so she had been exposed to the idea of death before, and that was probably how we would handle it again.  She was not quite 2 1/2, and she didn't need a big explanation.  The nurse told me that she would search for an age appropriate book to help us in explaining it to Whitney.  They found one a while later, called, "We Were Going to Have a Baby, But We Had an Angel Instead". 

http://www.amazon.com/Were-Gonna-Have-Angel-Instead/dp/0972424113

Then starting around 4:45, my father arrived at the hospital, then my husband and daughter and finally my grandmother.  The nurses asked if they should call a clergy member for us, and we declined.  Andy had our rabbi's cell phone number, so he just sent a text, telling him what happened, but that we didn't need him to stop by that night.  And we waited together until 5:30, when they started prepping me.  A lab technician came in first and drew another 11 vials of blood for testing.  I was worried they didn't leave enough for surgery!  Then just before the lab technician left, she realized she drew 1 too many.  What!?!  I could use that blood!  And she literally threw it away in the biohazard bin.  Then my triage nurse came in.  There were a lot of immediate questions that needed to be answered while we were waiting.  Did I want to return to the labor and delivery floor for the next 5 days where I would be around lots of infants and most patients would be excited new parents, but also where the staff was better trained in dealing with my situation?  I figured it would be hard staying on the floor, but it was something I should do.  The nursing staff was very nice and they put me in a room at the very end of the hall so that no one would walk past my room unless they were coming to see me.  None of the patients walking through their labor, none of them wheeling their newborns to or from the nursery.  It was as secluded as it could be.  And, they put a special marking on my door--a leaf with a drop of water falling from it--to indicate that my baby didn't make it so none of the staff would congratulate me accidentally.  I had to decide if I wanted an autopsy to determine her cause of death.  Having worked in a pathology lab years ago, I had witnessed infant autopsies, and I decided that I didn't need to put her little body through that.  Then, I had to decide if I wanted genetic testing done to be sure that there was nothing genetic that could have caused this.  They take a small sample of skin from her thigh and send it to the lab to be grown and then decoded.  I agreed that this was important to know, because looking ahead, if we decided to have other children, it might affect our decision.  I had to decide if I wanted to hold her.  My answer was a quick no.  I had to decide if I wanted to see her...let the doctors show her to me before whisking her away for tests and then to the morgue.  Again, it was a quick and easy...No.  As a Jew, we don't have open-casket funerals.  We don't typically look at the dead.  In fact, I hadn't ever seen a dead body until my twenties when my now ex-boyfriend's mother passed away from breast cancer.  And since then, I've only seen one other--my grandfather, prior to the funeral home coming over to pick him up.  And with both of these experiences, the picture of them, still and lifeless, is not one that I enjoy remembering.  I much prefer to think of them as happy and alive, smiling, with a twinkle in their eyes.  And I knew that if I had seen Miri dead, that would be the only way I could remember her.  I wouldn't be able to get that death image out of my head and replaced with happier ones, because there would be no other images I'd ever get to have.  So for me, that was an easy choice.  However, some of the nurses just couldn't understand that.  Or, perhaps they wanted to make sure I didn't change my mind, because I only had a matter of days before they disposed of her body and the opportunity would be lost forever.  What was hard was the constant questioning of my decision, not by me, but by people who dealt with this regularly, and the constant needing to explain myself to them.  What ended up happening was that I agreed to let them take pictures of her, and they kept them on file and didn't show them to me, just in case I changed my mind (which, over a year later, I still don't want to see).  After the logistics, it was time to prep me for surgery.  Even though I had been through a c-section before, I was still nervous.  I didn't get the time to mentally prepare for a major surgery.  I had already had two bouts of diarrhea just from anxiety.

We had my dad take Whitney to get her dinner and play with her.  Then it was time.  My grandmother gave me a kiss on my head, wished me luck, and waited in my room.  They took Andy to get him scrubbed up and dressed while I went into the OR, climbed up on the table, and had the anesthesiologist prep my spinal.  My triage nurse came in, along with my future evening nurse.  I leaned forward, hugging my nurse while they gave me a few shots of novocaine in the small of my back, then they threaded the catheter for the spinal.  Last time, my mom was the person I hugged during the procedure (as my husband is squeamish around needles).  It was a little scarier, not having the security blanket of my mother, but I kept telling myself..."Jenny, you are a 33 year old woman.  You should be okay having procedures and a surgery by yourself."  It wasn't fun, but it wasn't that bad either.  I had remembered from last time that after 12 hours of back labor, I didn't care how much it hurt...I was ready for the epidural.  This time, not being in labor, I was a bit more nervous, a bit less ready, and definitely less happy, but it was fine.  They numbed me plenty.  First I felt warm and then I started to tingle from my toes up to my chest, almost as high as my underarms.  Andy came back into the OR with me, and held my hand as the doctor and nurses pricked me all over to make sure that I was sufficiently numb, inserted a catheter, and then they started to cut.

Andy and I looked at each other, somewhat in shock, and just tried to remain calm.  I was pulled and tugged, and they told me when she was out, warned Andy not to look to his right, and took her away.  I wasn't pregnant anymore.  I wasn't a new mother either.  I felt deflated.  My doctor then cleaned everything out, and did a lot of pulling and tugging.  As he was sewing everything back up, he used a laser to cauterize some of the blood vessels.  The smell made Andy almost faint, and he had to be escorted out of the OR with smelling salts.  A few minutes later he came back in, they finished sewing me up, and wheeled me back to the room.  My grandmother left as soon as she saw that I made it through.  I said goodbye to my triage nurse, and an hour later, Andy left to go pick Whitney up and bring her back home to go to sleep.  Again, I was alone.  And now being alone felt really alone...I had been sharing my body with someone for 30 weeks, so prior to that evening, when I was alone, I still had company.  Not anymore.  I was truly all by myself and empty.