My story starts at the tender age of 18. I was a newlywed in college working a full time job. 8 months earlier I had been in an accident and suffered a brain injury that caused many side effects, including fainting spells and short term memory amnesia. I was still recovering from those issues when I met and fell in love with my husband. It was a whirlwind romance. We met and got married in 5 months. I went on birth control at the beginning of our marriage to ensure that we didn’t get pregnant. I knew that I physically could not handle a baby at the time. However, God had a different plan for me.
By the second month of our marriage we had found ourselves pregnant with a honeymoon baby. We were shocked, but things seemed to be going fine. I scheduled my first appointment with a new OBGYN and was put on a waiting list. I wouldn’t be seen until I was 5 months along. The doctor’s office said that I should be fine, since I was so young. Within the week I began to bleed. I called the doctor’s office and they said that it was normal for some women to bleed through the whole pregnancy. The bleeding got worse and worse and I started to become lethargic. I stopped working and going to school. My husband would come home and have to wake me up to eat. I slept the next 2 months away. I was growing bigger and my bleeding was getting worse. I decided I needed emergency help. We went to the ER and there received our first ultrasound. We heard the baby’s heartbeat and saw the baby for the first and only time. We were sent home with a 50/50 chance of the baby living.
I woke up a week later with a strong urge to go to the bathroom. I delivered the baby by myself in the bathroom of our tiny apartment. I called my husband to come home (he had just left for work). I was in shock and got in shower to clean up the hemorrhaging. Ben picked up our baby and we left for the hospital. I had to get a D&C and the hospital took the remains of our little one. We were sent home with no answers and traumatized.
6 week later we went to our follow-up visit and the doctor told us we should try again. He said that we should have no issues getting pregnant. We soon found ourselves with a positive pregnancy test and more bleeding. By the time we got to the doctor’s appointment, we had already miscarried that little one, too. I was devastated. I went into a deep depression for many years. I didn’t know how to move forward. I was stuck in the sorrow of the loss of my children and of the loss of my brain functions. I had to learn who I was and a whole new way of thinking. The subject of stillbirth and miscarriage was still very taboo. One day, a friend of mine came to visit me. She had been my youth leader at church. She shared her similar birth story to me and how she was able to move forward. She told me to study happiness in the scriptures. The more I learned on the subject, the more I started realizing that happiness is best achieved when serving others and getting outside of yourself. So, I set to work, looking for opportunities to serve. I slowly started finding my way out of the depression.
This process took me about 8 years to accomplish the tasks of finding happiness and learning how to use my “new” patterns of thinking from the brain injury. I was 27, and although we had never stopped trying to get pregnant, we had not gotten pregnant again. We realized that I was getting older and we needed to revisit the baby idea. We were referred to a fertility doctor who diagnosed me with PCOS. We had two rounds of shots and got pregnant both times. The first time with a single pregnancy and the second time with twins. We lost both pregnancies at the 10 week mark. We were devastated and decided to close the book on children.
We felt that we could live a happy and content life without our own baby. We didn’t use contraceptives, because we thought we needed an infertility specialist to get pregnant. So, at the ripe old age of 32, I went in for my annual gynecologist appointment and was told that I was pregnant. The gyno rushed me up to a high risk doctor who said that there were not a lot of precautions that we could take, but we needed to monitor the pregnancy. Within that week we had another miscarriage. I felt like God was playing games with me. We had finally come to peace with having no children and then to find out I was pregnant. I was scared and happy and shocked all in one. And then to lose the baby. I hate to say, but I wasn’t surprised. For me, pregnancy equals death. This pregnancy was no different then the others.
This story does not end in tears, though. In my 35th year, Ben and I received an urgent call that someone needed us to take their baby. We had 10 days to buy everything we needed and prepare for a newborn. It was right before Christmas and the miracle of our baby’s arrival was the most beautiful thing to ever happen to us. We had been married 16 years. That is 16 years since we lost our first little one. 16 years of searching for the reasons why God would put us on this journey. 16 years of heartache and healing.
I am a better person for what I have been through. I have learned to let the unanswered questions go and to have faith that God will answer my questions eventually. I have learned that grief has its time, but you have to learn to move forward and not let it consume you. I have learned that miracles do exist and God is waiting to pour blessings down on each of us. I have learned that I am good as I am and that I don’t have to get everything I want. I have learned to work through hard times in my marriage and to come out stronger on the other end. Finally, I have faith everyday that I will meet my little ones on the other side of the veil and we will meet with joy one day.