I don’t know that I could ever forget the heart sinking feeling I felt while staring at the brightest red blood pooled in the bottom of my underwear. Bright red blood usually isn’t a good sign while pregnant, which I was at the time. 7 weeks and 5 days to be exact. When I say “heart sinking” I mean it was as if I could feel my heart, being flooded with emotions and drowning in them. So many emotions, so fast, yet I don’t even know what I felt. That’s when I had to look up at my husband from the toilet where I was at, as he’s bathing our toddler and the only words I could manage to vomit up were “uh oh.” There was a pause. It seemed so quiet, not only that, but also like everything that was just in motion completely stopped. I don’t remember seeing splashing from my sweet girl in the bathtub, or hearing her bath time giggles, not even a clock ticking. Just silence. Just stillness. “I think we need to go in.” I managed to say as I broke through the quietness. It was close to bedtime for our toddler. So, we agreed to put her to sleep before we went into the ER.
My husband had just officially gotten out of the Marine Corps about a month prior to this. We were living with my grandparents at the time, God had blessed my husband with a good job, we had just bought the cutest little farm house to grow our own roots in. Life. Was. Grand. We were soaking up the family time that we so deeply missed while we were stationed away from family. We were finally able to share our little girl with everyone. Life. Was. Grand. And then, we find out we were going to have another baby! WE WERE SO EXCITED! We had tried for over a year for this baby! And finally, two little pink lines showed up on a pregnancy test one day- pregnant. I announced the pregnancy to my husband through a spontaneous photo session, which was a huge success! Shortly after, we announced to family & friends. We were all thrilled!
It was one day shy of a full two months I was able to nurture and be an assistant to God while growing this most valued human life inside of me. It seems so short when I say it out loud or type it down, but that doesn’t change my feelings towards the quote “a baby is a baby no matter how small.” I had a baby. That baby is a stepping stone in our walk of life. A part of our family for the rest of our time here on this earth.
Once I emerged from the bathroom after finding my blood stained underwear, I was met with my grandma in the kitchen (the one we were living with at the time.) I got the most gigantic lump in my throat and had to, again, vomit words out of my mouth. Physically force them through my teeth. “I think we’re losing the baby.” I said as my eyes filled with tears. I just said that out loud. I actually really do think we’re losing this baby. Then the tears started flowing, from both my eyes and my grandma’s. I quickly tried pulling it together and told her we would be putting our daughter to bed and then heading to the ER.
I don’t remember waiting to leave to go to the hospital, or my daughter getting out of the tub, my husband putting her to sleep, or even talking at all until my husband and I arrived at the hospital. I couldn’t believe I told the nurse checking me in that the reason I was there was for a miscarriage. It seemed so surreal I actually was there. The wait to be seen felt like forever. We were finally seen. I don’t remember a whole lot, just that the whole night was a long blur, with a few vivid moments. A doctor examined me, asked about cramping, bleeding, and all of that stuff. I hadn’t had cramps hardly at all, but blood, yes. Blood that started out a few days prior as brownish colored spotting and increased to bright red that night. A phlebotomist came in to draw my blood to measure my HCG levels (HCG is another word for pregnancy hormones.) I tried to make light of the situation and mentioned that my best friend was also a phlebotomist and it turns out they knew each other! We chatted over that for the time while she was in my room, and we exchanged smiles a few times. Once the doctor came back in, he sent me down to get an ultrasound. We made it to the room where they perform ultrasounds, and this whole time, I had been freezing. Chilling and shaking down to my bones. But I remember being especially cold when we reached the room. I was so nervous. The worst kind of butterflies you could imagine. The tech put the jelly on my stomach and then took the wand to it. Minutes went by and there was no flicker on the screen like there should’ve been. I’ve seen these before. Where is the flicker indicating a heartbeat? Why isn’t there a heartbeat? She didn’t say anything to me. But she didn’t have to. I knew. I knew I no longer had a living life inside of me, I was carrying a dead baby. She wheeled me back to our room in a wheelchair, my husband following suit closely behind. I think he knew, too. We didn’t exchange words, just a forced half smile that was hiding heartbreak. I remember we seen the same phlebotomist who drew my blood as we were on our way back to our room. She gave me the “oh hey again” smile and chuckled under her breath a bit, but I just couldn’t give the same in return. I tried. I did. I think I probably ended up having a literal squiggly line smile. Tears were streaming down my face silently.
“Your HCG levels aren’t where they should be and the ultrasound showed there was no heartbeat.” I KNOW. I KNOW THERE ISN’T. I SAW IT. BUT WHY? CAN YOU PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT? MAYBE WE SHOULD DO IT AGAIN? I had all of these thoughts and so many more buzzing around my head as if my thoughts were a hundred honeybees. Our doctor was the best. I know he was put there for me and my husband that night. He was sympathetic and opened up to us, with tears in his eyes, that he and his wife had also gone through a miscarriage. A couple, actually. He told us our options were to let the process happen naturally or he told us we could come back in where they would perform a surgery to manually remove baby and all tissue, known as a D & C. We opted for things to happen naturally. //He cared, and that truly helped.
All this time, I had been checking on my daughter who was sleeping at my grandma’s house. She stayed asleep until about the last hour or so were were at the hospital. She was inconsolable without her mama there. She woke up, and I was gone. I was gone because I was learning that her sibling was dead. No longer with us. My spirit was saddened and crushed and now I know my other child doesn’t have her mama nearby and is not coping well. I’ve never not been there for her when she wakes up. Any parent who’s ever experienced being away from your child when they need you the most, knows it’s awful. So, of course, that just added to the hurt I was feeling. It might sound silly to those who don’t have children, but it’s a real thing!
We finally left the hospital and left it in a hurry to get back to our daughter. Here we were, after midnight, making a quick stop to Walgreens to get some depends for when things picked up and my bleeding got more intense. The doctor told us that I could expect lots of blood and cramping- this was a miniature child labor and birth, after all. In expectations that things would happen soon, we figured it best to have something on hand. My sweet husband, bless every last piece of his being- he runs into the store and gets some depends and pads for his me. The drive back to my grandparents home was silent. Which seems to be the trend here. Once we reached their house, I consoled my daughter as I nurse and rock her to sleep. Now, thinking and knowing how truly miraculous her existence is. Looking at her life through an entirely new set of eyes.
The days turned into about one week before I would finally birth my tiny baby. (I will include pictures for those who want to see what my baby looked like when his or her heart stopped beating at 7 weeks and 5 days at the very end of this post. I never have intended to share these images. But I feel like, although sad, these photos are interesting to some and truly incredible. My baby had eyes, little arm nubs. A heart. Really incredibly amazing stuff.) Miscarriage seems so common yet so many know hardly anything about it. I surely didn’t. Did you know that once a miscarriage starts, or you learn your baby has no heartbeat and life flowing through its body anymore, that it can take weeks until your body recognizes this and births your baby?! Because I had no clue! I guess I never thought about it that much. I had no more blood since the night we went to the ER for days. Nothing. No cramping. Nothing that indicated my body was ready to detach this baby from me. The waiting was horrible. Every morning waking up knowing you’re child is dead inside of you and you still have to birth this baby and come to grips with the heartbreaking reality of it all. Through all of this, even before we learned our baby had no heartbeat anymore, my husband and I prayed. We prayed together and we prayed silently. Thanking and praising God for giving us this child, even if for a short time. Also, thanking and praising Him that He was so gracious as to take this baby’s life before he or she was born into sin. My baby would never know hurt, confusion, feel pain. None of it. Immediately, my baby would know nothing but love, singing, praising, dancing, walking on streets of gold in heaven. How amazing and gracious of my God to do such a thing? Knowing this gave me an overwhelming sense of peace in such a dark time. I still had joy in my heart and thankfulness through all of this and I know that true joy like I had only comes from the Father in heaven. I was only carrying a shell inside of my womb now. There was no spirit, no soul. My baby is already in the presence of God, there isn’t anything left but a mere shell inside of my body. Death is something experienced by all, escaped by none. Some just have more time before that happens than others do.
Eventually (about a week later) my bleeding picked up. I woke up fairly early one morning, came downstairs and was in the kitchen. Thats when I felt something in between my legs escape. I thought to myself “that was either a heaping amount of blood… or that was the baby.” I go into the bathroom, pull down the depends I was wearing and thats when I saw something. I thought “that’s surely it.” Sure enough, it was. I rinsed off the “glob” I had found, and thats when I saw it. As plain as day. A baby. My hands started trembling, my heart started racing, my head started spinning. I am holding my baby in my hands. This is my sweet baby. Oh, how I fell in love even deeper so instantly. I clasped my hands together and walked out of the bathroom, unsure of what to do or what to say. My grandpa was awake, but my grandma not yet awake. I didn’t want to hide the fact I had just birthed my baby, but wanted to be sensitive to others, too, as I know everyone takes this sort of thing entirely different. I told my grandpa as he met me in the kitchen to grab some more coffee “I just had the baby.” I don’t know that he knew what to say. I don’t remember him saying anything. “Do you want to see?” I choked up. He did, and I showed him. He was equally as amazed as I was I think. I went in shortly after to wake my grandma up and told her I had the baby. She awoke and I showed her as well. We couldn’t believe how little but developed the baby was. Seriously it was incredible. The rest of the day felt weird. I don’t know how to explain it, just weird. I wasn’t yet able to talk with my husband as he was at work and would be for the rest of the day, which is all I wanted to do. I just wanted my husband with me so, so badly. My cramping picked up in intensity as I still had to birth the placenta. My husband came home from work later that day, and by then, my cramping was intense. I didn’t birth the placenta until 12 hours after I had the baby that morning. This was much harder than I had imagined. I actually had to do comfort measures during this time. I am so thankful my husband was able to be there with me for this part as it was much harder than the first part. I eventually birthed my baby’s little placenta (which was way bigger than I thought it would be! and it was a bilobed placenta!) I felt instant relief once that was out of me, physically, emotionally and mentally. I knew it was over. All of it was over. Well, the physical part anyways.
We named our baby Jude Oakley. We wanted to choose a name with meaning, just as we had for our first daughter, Shiloh Grace. (Shiloh means God’s gift. “God’s gift of Grace-” her middle name.) Jude means “praise.” We wanted to be sure that praise was always on our lips during this time and after. We chose Oakley because we wanted to bury our baby under an oak tree. We were able to accomplish this and had a beautiful, intimate memorial and burial, just my husband, daughter and I. We picked out an oak tree as a family and buried our baby on our property at the little farm house we just bought. We let our daughter color the box we put the baby in, we kissed it and said goodbye. We took turns filling in the hole, and all helped decorate around the tree with rocks. We stood there as a family and prayed a prayer for us and our baby. My heart was broken yet so thankful. This helped me so much in healing, I think. I can see our oak tree from our house. I often look out there when I’m at the sink. I can’t wait to watch our tree grow and flourish.
Since losing Jude, we have since became pregnant again! Which was a HUGE shock to us as it took over a year to conceive our first and second baby. This one took two weeks! I didn’t even know my body was capable of becoming pregnant in such a short amount of time! We were thrilled. We are thrilled. Here we are now, halfway through this pregnancy, anticipating the arrival of our rainbow baby and never forgetting the storm of our last baby. (A rainbow baby, for those who don’t know, is a term used for a pregnancy and baby after the loss of a previous one. A rainbow of hope comes after the storm.) Some days it still hurts, but I think it always will. Some days are harder than others. This is a part of the process. The hurt reminds me that we are mortals. That we are still here on this earth, a temporary dwelling place until our hearts, too, stop beating and we find ourself before the face of God. Before we find our souls cast into eternity, whether that be heaven or hell. This earth isn’t home and won’t be with us forever.
Mamas, know I am hugging you so big right now for those whose hearts have had to go through this. May we all see our babies in heaven again one day.
Blessings,
Ashley xoxo
For those who want to see the couple pictures of Jude and the placenta, keep scrolling.
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