My Heart's In Dixie

As many of you know (at least those who keep up with me on Facebook), I recently announced we were unexpectedly - but thrilled to be – pregnant. Unfortunately, despite several ultrasounds that showed a healthy baby with a strong heartbeat, for some unknown reason our baby died sometime late last week.

After discovering the baby’s death by ultrasound Saturday afternoon (and thank you to my wonderful doctor, Elan Simckes, for leaving his family on the weekend to personally conduct the ultrasound, rather than sending me to a hospital ER), I had surgery late Saturday night to recover the remains so that genetic testing can be done in an effort to understand what happened. Given that it happened almost ten weeks in and that everything looked great, my doctor suspects a catastrophic genetic disorder such as Turner Syndrome. Once the testing is complete, I am so grateful that St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, through their Heart Prints program, will bury our baby in a special area of Calvary Cemetary in St. Louis.

I know some will say that we should not have shared our pregnancy news, especially with our children, until we had safely passed through the first trimester. To those people I would respectfully and with love offer the following for them to consider. We decided to go ahead and share our joyous news for several reasons: we did wait until we had seen a heartbeat on ultrasound twice and our doctor was confident that the baby looked great – once the heartbeat is seen, there is a more than 95% chance that a miscarriage won’t occur; we felt that the more people knew, the more people would pray for us, which we felt was very important; and, if something did go wrong, we knew we would need the support and help of our family and friends.

Some people might be able to hide that they’ve suffered a miscarriage – everyone handles grief in different ways. I am not one of those people. I’m usually a pretty upbeat person, but right now I am very sad, and I need to be able to be sad without having to either fake it that everything’s okay or come up with some goofy excuse for being less-than-perky. I also need to be able to share all of life – the great happiness and the great pain – with my family, including our children.

Loss is a part of life that, as much as we try to protect our children from, sometimes reaches them. With guidance from our wonderfully supportive doctor and pastor, we have gently but truthfully shared the news with our children. They are sad, but they are already thanking God in their prayers for taking “Peanut” (as they’d already christened the baby) to Heaven to be with Him. We have surrounded them with love from family and friends to help them work through their feelings and emerge even stronger and more resilient than they already are.

As for me – I am sad. I am grieving. I am crying a lot. It’s hard to even breathe when you have to discuss burying a baby – those are words that should never have to be spoken by any mother. But God is with me and has walked right beside me through this whole nightmare weekend. And through the haze of pain, He has shown me such love  and grace – my dear husband has been a rock and an incredible blessing, we’ve had amazing friends step up to take care of the girls with such love and open arms, and our family has been understanding and attentive. God is so good.

With God’s love and help, we will be okay. We will get through this, and someday we may even think about trying again. But right now, we’re going to mourn our loss and keep leaning on God’s grace and mercy to get us through. Thank you all for your prayers and love – they are needed and much appreciated. God bless you all.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 10:32 am and is filed under Family, Friends, God, Parenting, Prayer Requests, Princesses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.