Today it has been exactly four weeks since my little boy went to heaven. I've managed well all day, but typing those words knocked the wind out of me. Somehow this makes it all true. Some hours of the day I can go on not thinking about having ever been pregnant or so close to having the family that I wanted, and there is a bliss that I find in that distraction. When the distraction passes, there is a strong guilt. How could I want to forget him? Sometimes I feel I should be in pain every second of the day, because if I'm not, what the hell kind of a mom am I?
When I started this post I thought it might be appropriate to write a more detailed recap of that day. And maybe I will finish this that way or maybe I will write one later on. But now I feel reconnected to all of the emotions of that day and, while we lost our entire world, I feel connected to what really fell apart for the first time- myself.
I remember the second I realized that something wasn't right. I realized that I was not, in fact, pissing myself. I was so scared. The smallest amount of hope- maintained by my wonderful husband- allowed me to believe that maybe it was just a fluke and even more so I thought that perhaps I could be put on bed-rest. Surely as long as the baby was okay still there was something they could do. It is a knife in my heart to think if we had just made it a few weeks more we could have had a shot at saving him. I still wrestle with the guilt. Maybe I should have pushed to just see what would happen. But at my follow-up, the pathology report showed that I had already started to develop an infection. I imagine we couldn't have gotten very far without causing serious damage to both myself and my precious baby boy. Knowing that helps, some, but still when I begin to think about the difference a few weeks would have made....
When we made it to the ER about an hour and a half after my water broke, (still not sure that that is what had happened), the nurse found the heartbeat on the ultrasound. Later, the nurse at the doctor checked my urine for protein and searched for the baby's heartbeat as they did at every appointment. She found it. At 9:30 my baby's heart was beating in the 150's. He was still alive. He was kicking me as I registered at the hospital and as I changed into the gown. No amount of assurance from the doctor would ever be enough to convince me that my baby would have died on his own. The doctor told me with no fluid and with tissues he believed to be from my placenta, the baby would not have any circulation and would surely pass away before he was delivered. He did die inside of me, but I do not know when. I will never know if it was the induction that killed him- I'm afraid to ask if that's possible. If it is, I killed my child. I took his life. I was just trying to make the right choice. I didn't want to get an infection that could make it impossible for me to have other children, like my mother had later in her life, should it be true that Landon would never make it. But fuck, if we could have just made it a few more weeks....
When the doctor confirmed my water had broken, his eyes were sorrowful. He was heartbroken to share the news and because of this I didn't even try to hold back tears. I couldn't look at anyone because it was such terrible news that no matter how nervous I had been in the beginning of the pregnancy I could never have prepared myself. We were so close to halfway there, everything had been so perfect, and more so my overly-intuitive dad and myself didn't see it coming. We always had a way of knowing when the other foot would drop but this time we didn't. The doctor said exactly this: "It is your fluid that you lost- and you will lose the baby. It is nothing you did, you didn't cause this to happen". I cried and he offered Mike and I a few moments to decide what path we wanted to take from here. He left the room and Mike shot up to his feet and over to me. We cried and Mike instantly told me that it would be okay, we would try again. I apologized over and over for not being able to carry his child. He held me and we made our choices. I called my dad and my best friend. I'll never forget the way my dad's voice sounded. "Oh sunshine", with the saddest tone I had ever heard from him. I couldn't really tell him anything else and told him as well as my best friend that I would text them when I knew what we were doing. I hardly held it together, in fact I lost it a few times, during the trip back to the house to gather some things and the hour long drive to the hospital. When we walked in I felt different- I was numb. I cried once after that, and then not again until I felt my son be born.
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