Pound Pup Legacy

One of my dearest friends from nursing school lost two babies before she finally went full-term with her first child.  She's now the mother to three children.  In fact, to my knowledge, within our group of friends, four out six of us lost pregnancies.  One was due to an abortion.  One chose to do IVF.  One chose to relinquish her child (when she was in high-school); one (myself) was relinquished.  Yes, we were quite the crew.

Below is a sample-story how women cope with the loss of a baby, before birth..  It's a sad-story, because it's the loss of not only a baby that others don't recognize as being "real", but it's the loss of a future that was a couple's dream.  Miscarriage is NOT a singular event, it's a life-altering one.

 

http://health.msn.com/pregnancykids/pregnancy/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100168320&GT1=10610

Becky McNeil is now the mother of a healthy, thriving 17-month old baby boy named Jasper. Jasper was born after a trouble-free pregnancy and a long but relatively eventless delivery.

Despite McNeil’s ideal childbirth experience, she’s 80 percent sure she doesn’t want to have another baby. After having everything work out so well, she doesn’t want to risk something going wrong the next time. McNeil is not an excessive worrier, but she knows from real experience how bad it can be.

A hopeful beginning

McNeil and her husband, Ben, got pregnant with a different son on their first try before they were married. McNeil’s husband had concerns about a genetic disorder from his family. Even though she was low-risk at age 33, they decided to test the baby. Their obstetrician recommended they get a chorionic villus sampling. While slightly riskier than an amniocentesis, which is done at 16 weeks, a CVS can be performed between seven and 10 weeks. Test results showed that their baby was healthy—and they were having a boy.

At 12 weeks pregnant, McNeil started bleeding lightly. She called her doctor, who said light spotting does sometimes happen during a pregnancy, but that she needed to come in for a checkup immediately upon return from their honeymoon. Her obstetrician referred her to a specialist for a spate of tests, and they started a schedule of bi-weekly appointments. “Everything checked out normal, except for the bleeding,” says McNeil. “Then one morning I woke up and there was blood all over the sheets. The doctor said come to the hospital right away.”

At 20 weeks pregnant, the baby seemed to be doing well, but she still had bleeding so her doctors put her on bed rest.

During her 23^rd week, the couple went for another checkup with the specialist. They were in the ultrasound room with a technician they had worked with many times before. “We’d been talking, and all of a sudden she stopped,” McNeil says. “She said ‘I’d better get the doctor.’ The doctor said ‘You’ve lost a lot of amniotic fluid and the fetus is in distress.'”

The doctor told McNeil that she would probably go into labor soon and deliver prematurely and called McNeil’s obstetrician to convey the information. McNeil remembers the two doctors saying, “Now we have something from which to make a decision.” It was clear that the baby was dying.

A loss beyond words

The decision that McNeil and her husband had to make was devastating: Did they want to wait and deliver a dead baby, or did they want to terminate the pregnancy now? Her amniotic fluid was low and couldn’t be replenished. The baby had already been under distress for an unknown period of time. “Much anguish and anxiety ensued as we talked about what we wanted to do,” says McNeil. Finally, she and her husband decided to terminate the pregnancy. “Making that decision was agonizing for us,” she says. “It was the first time I really felt like a mother—and the first feeling of being a mother was letting my child down.”

Although they’d decided to move forward with the surgery, they were told they would still need to wait a week for the hospital to schedule the procedure. They returned home.

Four days later, McNeil was resting and watching a movie, when something didn’t feel right. “There had been a lot of pressure on my pelvis all day long,” she says. “I had to go to the bathroom, and went in, and felt the umbilical cord.”

They called their doctor and rushed to the hospital where they pushed the cord back in and said McNeil would have to go into labor and deliver the baby. McNeil says she grew hysterical. “I pitched a fit,” she remembers. “I said ‘There is no way, no way.’ I was screaming and crying.”

The hospital was able to schedule the surgery for the next morning and McNeil and her husband stayed there that night, trying to process their loss, knowing there was a chance she would go into labor before the procedure. “They had a nurse come in to talk to us,” says McNeil. “She said ‘Do you want to hold the baby? Do you want a lock of hair? Do you want to dress the baby up? Do you want to take pictures?’ They also put this purple flag on your door so people know that it is a dead pregnancy.”

McNeil did not go into labor, and instead delivered her baby through surgery the next morning. She went home, took a couple of weeks off from work, and tried to patch her life back together. But it was hard, harder than she could have imagined, to recover from her loss. McNeil’s grief was compounded by the death of her father a month after she lost her son, and by a miscarriage she had several months after that. “The most difficult part was everything that happened after,” says McNeil. “There was an entire year from the time I lost the baby and got pregnant again with Jasper, and that year was just hellish.”

McNeil worked through her grief by joining support groups, going to therapy, reaching out to other friends, staying engaged in her work, reading, and journaling. She and her husband named their baby, bought him a headstone, and placed it next to her father’s headstone in New Hampshire. They moved from New York to Colorado for a fresh start. Finally, her pregnancy with Jasper took. “It was a hard year, but getting pregnant again and having a healthy child has totally turned my life around,” says McNeil.

A Bittersweet Moving On

Though they were ecstatic, the pregnancy was fraught with anxiety. “I never felt like I had that happy pregnancy feeling that so many women have,” McNeil says. “My world has been very tainted—though (that affect) was more about the pregnancy, and less about how I raise my child now, how I think about him now.”

While losing her first child hasn’t changed McNeil into an anxious parent, it has resulted in a complex texture of feelings that have changed over time. When her first baby died, she decided not to see or hold him, and now wishes she’d made a different choice. “I didn’t want to see the baby at that point, but I regret that decision,” says McNeil. “I wish I had had him cremated. That’s something that still to this day haunts me. I don’t know where my child is. Moving away from New York has made that much more difficult for me. I regret not having a piece of him here. I feel like I’ve abandoned him.”

McNeil has learned to accept these feelings of sadness, and live with them alongside her feelings of joy for having Jasper in her life. She knows that one day she will tell Jasper about his older brother—not in terms of an angel baby, or in a spiritual or religious way, but in terms of conveying that he was, very much, a real person.  “I see it that Jasper has an older brother,” she says. “I’ll just tell him the truth. I want him to know that there is another person in his life who is related to him. That we felt strongly connected to that child, we memorialized him, we think about him. We think about him every year on his birthday. I think about him every day.”