This post will be sad.
I am grieving the loss of my fourth baby. He was about 5 weeks past conception. When I found out I was pregnant, I was overjoyed. I was super excited, but I had these strange feelings. I first was wondering if I really read the test right. Then the test came up faint at the midwife's office. Not an unusual faintness, but unusual for me. My lines have always been blazing even though I took them really early. We ordered an HcG test, for my own comfort. So if the levels where normal it would put my mind at ease. I didn't get the test results when I expected them, which made me wonder, what they were. Did the midwife get them and could she not bring herself to tell me the results? I tried to put it out of my mind. Then on Monday June 6, after I got up from dinner I went to the bathroom and there was blood.
I panicked and called the midwife asked her for the test results. She said they were normal. So here is where I have conflict. The test that was supposed to reassure me came too late and later on made me really sad. I had only that initial blood, I stopped bleeding and my midwife said that wasn't enough blood for a full miscarriage. So hearing her, I grasped on and held firm to hope, because hope is only a virtue when things are hopeless. Perhaps the baby would be ok. I asked what the options where from here, and she said that I could go in for a vaginal ultrasound, but she told me that the only thing an ultra sound would do would tell me if my baby was alive or not, something I could figure out on my own in a matter of days. If I had stopped bleeding completely, I might have gone in because I wouldn't know for sure what had happened on Monday, but I did continue to bleed. And it was apparent to me, very soon, that my baby was no longer alive and now my body was bringing him out.
My baby is too small to see. I have been saving some things I have been passing, hoping my child's body is among them, so I can give him a dignified burial. He deserves it. He is human and he deserves the respect of any person, and to me much more, because he is my baby.
In my process of grief, I have accepted it as God's will. My midwife told me that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. The sad thing is we live in a fallen world, and in a fallen world, people die for seemingly no reason. The search for answers, the what ifs, can end up hurting us more and causing us to grieve longer rather than accepting what it is. Babies die. That's how it is. That may sound cold, it's not. My baby died. There is nothing I could have done to prevent it. I want my baby. I still think about my life when I was pregnant, how I wish I could still be there. I see left overs in the fridge from when I was still pregnant. I see the clothes I wore that day blood stained, the sheets on my bed. We just brought a bigger table into the dinning room to accommodate our growing family, that day.
So knowing that my baby was normal for the time of the test, allowed me hope; however, it has brought me more pain because occasionally I will think,
"My baby was normal. What did I do to hurt my baby?" Then I feel like the loss is my fault. That is a dangerous road. I am not going to do that to myself. I have 3 other children that I feel so lucky to have carried to term. I feel lucky that I got to feel them move, lucky I got to hear their heart beat, lucky to have delivered them. Yes, I feel lucky that I got to feel the pain of child birth, because it is a much nicer pain than the pain of miscarriage.
So please keep me in your prayers my friends.
I am grieving the loss of my fourth baby. He was about 5 weeks past conception. When I found out I was pregnant, I was overjoyed. I was super excited, but I had these strange feelings. I first was wondering if I really read the test right. Then the test came up faint at the midwife's office. Not an unusual faintness, but unusual for me. My lines have always been blazing even though I took them really early. We ordered an HcG test, for my own comfort. So if the levels where normal it would put my mind at ease. I didn't get the test results when I expected them, which made me wonder, what they were. Did the midwife get them and could she not bring herself to tell me the results? I tried to put it out of my mind. Then on Monday June 6, after I got up from dinner I went to the bathroom and there was blood.
I panicked and called the midwife asked her for the test results. She said they were normal. So here is where I have conflict. The test that was supposed to reassure me came too late and later on made me really sad. I had only that initial blood, I stopped bleeding and my midwife said that wasn't enough blood for a full miscarriage. So hearing her, I grasped on and held firm to hope, because hope is only a virtue when things are hopeless. Perhaps the baby would be ok. I asked what the options where from here, and she said that I could go in for a vaginal ultrasound, but she told me that the only thing an ultra sound would do would tell me if my baby was alive or not, something I could figure out on my own in a matter of days. If I had stopped bleeding completely, I might have gone in because I wouldn't know for sure what had happened on Monday, but I did continue to bleed. And it was apparent to me, very soon, that my baby was no longer alive and now my body was bringing him out.
My baby is too small to see. I have been saving some things I have been passing, hoping my child's body is among them, so I can give him a dignified burial. He deserves it. He is human and he deserves the respect of any person, and to me much more, because he is my baby.
In my process of grief, I have accepted it as God's will. My midwife told me that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. The sad thing is we live in a fallen world, and in a fallen world, people die for seemingly no reason. The search for answers, the what ifs, can end up hurting us more and causing us to grieve longer rather than accepting what it is. Babies die. That's how it is. That may sound cold, it's not. My baby died. There is nothing I could have done to prevent it. I want my baby. I still think about my life when I was pregnant, how I wish I could still be there. I see left overs in the fridge from when I was still pregnant. I see the clothes I wore that day blood stained, the sheets on my bed. We just brought a bigger table into the dinning room to accommodate our growing family, that day.
So knowing that my baby was normal for the time of the test, allowed me hope; however, it has brought me more pain because occasionally I will think,
"My baby was normal. What did I do to hurt my baby?" Then I feel like the loss is my fault. That is a dangerous road. I am not going to do that to myself. I have 3 other children that I feel so lucky to have carried to term. I feel lucky that I got to feel them move, lucky I got to hear their heart beat, lucky to have delivered them. Yes, I feel lucky that I got to feel the pain of child birth, because it is a much nicer pain than the pain of miscarriage.
So please keep me in your prayers my friends.
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