The loss of a child

I guess I better go back in time a little to June 30, to fill in the background of our loss since I didn't officially start this blog until yesterday, though I've been talking about this and blogging elsewhere for a while now.

On Saturday, June 30, I was putting Natalya to bed, reading her a story, when it occurred to me that I hadn't felt the baby move in a while. When I started to think about it, I couldn't actually remember when I had last felt her move. I got scared. I hoped Natalya would fall asleep quickly so I could go drink some juice and poke and prod my belly to try to get some movement. Deep down though, I already knew. I knew she was gone. I didn't even know she was a she, because we had not had an ultrasound, but my gut told me the baby was gone. Luckily Natalya fell asleep quickly and I went and drank a huge glass of orange juice, ate two cinnamon rolls and jumped around some (as much as a 7-months pregnant Mommy can, at least). Nothing. I called my midwife - who was getting married that day- and asked her what to do. She told me to do the same thing I had already done, wait thirty minutes, and call her back if there was no movement. I drank more oj, and still nothing. I called her back and she said to go into the ER and have them check for a heartbeat, but at this point, it was confirmed in my brain. I called Doug to tell him that I was headed to the hospital b/c I hadn't felt movement and that I was going to call his dad to ask him to come over and sit with Natalya.

I remained very calm.

I called Phillip (who was a t Kristine's house) and asked him if he could come over and sit with Natalya so I could go to the hospital. It took him about half an hour or 45 minutes to get there and by midnight I headed up to the ER. They took me up to Labor and Delivery Triage rather quickly and as I was walking with the nurse up to triage, she was telling me, "We'll put you on the monitor for half an hour or an hour, and if everything seems fine you'll go home". In my head, I was thinking, you are assuming everything is fine, and I am being irrational. You guys are probably used to pregnant women coming in and panicking because they don't feel movement, but the baby is sleeping. This is not the case. I wish it was, but it's not. Still calm, I nodded my head and said "okay".

She sat me on a bed and gave me a gown to get into. After she came back, she had the monitor and the cold jelly stuff. She squirted the jelly on my tummy and put the monitor on me - and shifted it around. Then shifted it some more. Then said "sometimes the baby is reverse and it's hard to get the heartbeat from this angle, is it head-down?" I said "yes" still thinking in my head that she was not going to find a heartbeat. After a few minutes of this, she says, "I'm going to go get the doppler, I'll be right back". She leaves and I can hear another woman in triage who is complaining- LOUDLY- that she's in pain and so forth. I wanted to go smack her. She is whining about being in early stages of labor (so early, she was being sent home, so really, how painful could it be??!) and I was about to have to go through the delivery of a stillborn. I wanted to shake her and tell her to Shut it. At least she still had her baby.

The nurse comes back and puts the doppler on me. Several minutes of searching and she says, "I'm going to go get the sonar". She leaves and I am trying to figure out whom I am going to call first to tell them we've lost the baby. Several minutes pass with me listening to little miss complainer across the way, and then the curtain opens and it's the nurse, along with another nurse, the sonar machine and a doctor. Yep, I think, they know. They get me set up and then put the sonar on my tummy. I can see around the nurse, to the machine, and I see the perfect profile of my baby's face. Still. No movement. It is the first time I have seen my child because we did not have an ultrasound done. And there is nothing. The profile is remarkably like Natalya's and I can feel the tears forming. They expand the shot to include the chest and there's no heart movement. I can't stop the tears, and I close my eyes and turn my head away from the image of my unborn child. The doctor grabs my hand and holds it tightly, speaking very softly to tell me what I already can see with my own eyes, and knew in my heart. "There's no heart tones that we can tell. I'm so sorry, so very sorry." One of the nurses has unshed tears in her eyes and all three are looking at me with such sympathy it's almost unbearable. Both nurses have their hands on me, one on my arm, and one on my leg, and the doctor is still holding my hand. He asks me the legally required questions, have I taken any drugs, have I been physically abused and so forth. I say no, everything has been fine. They ask me if I have had problems with this pregnancy, or with my first child, and I say no. The doctor asks me if there's anyone that can come be with me and I say "no. My husband is a truck driver and he's on the road. He was supposed to be home earlier today, but he is scheduled to be home in the early am. I need to call him." I then ask the doctor what happens next. He says they will admit me and do an official ultrasound and then induce. I tell him that I will not induce until my husband can be there, even if that means I have to go home and come back. They ask if they can get me a phone to make some calls and give me some privacy, and I ask if it's ok if I use my cell phone. They say it's fine. I finally let go of the doctor's hand and they all troop out.

I call Doug, who had been sleeping and ask him how soon he can be there. I am trying not to cry, and not being very successful. I tell him "We've lost the baby and I need you here. When can you get here?" and start bawling. I can hear one of the nurses crying for me outside the curtain. Doug says he will call dispatch and try to get the trailer he is hauling picked up so he can get to me quickly. Luckily he isn't far away. Then I proceed to call my Mom, who is sound asleep, and tell her the news, asking her if she can come down in the morning to take care of Natalya throughout the process. She says she will do whatever I need and will call me when she leaves in a few hours. I then call a friend in California and tell her what has happened so she can update my online friends, who I know are worried, after I posted that I was going to the hospital before I left.
The nurse comes back to move me to a room and I have pulled myself together. She pushes me to the room and then helps me get settled. She looks at me and starts crying. She is young, I would guess early 20's, and she leans over and puts her arms around me, crying with me. She says that she is so sorry and asks if I want someone to sit with me until my husband can get there. I say no, I will be okay. She tightens her arms and squeezes me then heads out, wiping her eyes.
Time marches forward, then the doctor comes to check on me, the ultrasound tech comes in to do the u/s and the lab guy comes in to draw blood. I ask the u/s tech if she can see what sex the baby is. "I'd rather know now than later, if at all possible" I tell her. She says she will try to see. After about twenty minutes of her rotating, probing, scanning and so on, she says "the baby's legs are together, I can't really tell. I'm sorry". What was supposed to be a fun surprise is now something else I have to cry over at birth.

Several hours later Doug calls and says he is headed home. I have not been able to call Phillip to tell him what's going on because he doesn't have a cell phone and we don't have a home phone. I tell him he'll have to tell his Dad, and that my Mom should be there around 9am. He later calls me from home and I ask him to bring my camera and a few other things. They'd given me cervadil and cytotech to induce and we are waiting for it to kick in. When inserting the cervadil, the nurse checked me and said I was already 1cm and very soft, so she thinks my body was already preparing b/c it realized that the baby had passed. I started contracting immediately, every minute. I dealt with it for a bit, taking a shower and talking with Doug (who had arrived at the hospital at 5am), and then around 9:30 they came and gave me a second dose. The contractions were right on top of each other and going going non-stop. I asked for some stadol and after that I slept some and amused Doug by talking about the things floating off the table and the size of his head (hallucinations, FUN!). I didn't want to get an epidural b/c of the possibility of a c-section and b/c I was at that same hospital when my sister-in-law gave birth with an epidural, and I knew how it would go (flat on my back, feet up in the air, etc) and I didn't want to do that. I did eventually give in because I was contracting every minute and there was no telling how long it was going to last, I didn't think my body could take it.

So the anesthesiologist came in and did the epi and then I got to start the process of laying on my back. Over the next many hours, nothing changed. I was at 1cm, and got to about 4cm by late that night. I will never have another epi as long as I live unless I have no choice. At one point my blood pressure bottomed out and I was frantically buzzing the nurses to get me laying down on my side b/c I was about to throw up or pass out. I think it was 81/40. I was numb from the bottom of my ribs down and couldn't move or feel anything, It was awful. I couldn't move to alleviate the pain in my back that was so bad I wanted to cry, so I had to keep getting the nurses to come in and roll me from side to side "Like a rotisserie chicken". It was horrible. I'm glad I did get it for what it's worth though, because I ended up having contractions every minute for 17 hours. It did allow me to get some sleep though.

A bit later, the nurse came in with the paperwork for us to fill out, and told us that after she was born, they would take the baby and clean her up, then bring her back to us so we could spend as much time with her as we wanted to. She asked if we wanted to see her before they cleaned her and we said yes. She also talked about our options of autopsy or not, and we spent some time talking about that, finally deciding that yes, if there was information to be gleaned from her death, then we wanted to know what it was, to find out what happened, if possible.

I was desperately missing Natalya. I had been hearing the woman across the hall on and off yelling in her labor and suddenly I heard her baby crying and I lost it. It was the first time I cried heaving sobs. Doug put his arms around me and I cried and cried. Finally, knowing I needed to hold my living, breathing baby girl in my arms, Doug left to go get Mom and Natalya and bring them back for a bit.

A bit later the nurse came in and asked me if I tried to move or something before Doug left (she was looking at my heart rate/pulse monitor) and I said, "No, but I cried a lot".

I napped some and when they got back, Natalya walked in and said "MOMMY!!!" "Mommy go bye-bye!" She did not like me being there at all. Doug put her in my lap and she gave me big hugs and kisses and made me feel so much better. They stayed for a bit, then Natalya wanted to leave and get something to eat, so they left and I slept some more. That was when the blood pressure dropped, and so I felt nauseous and they gave me more drugs. I swear my bloodstream was probably one huge cocktail of drugs. I don't even know what all they gave me, and I didn't really care. Doug finally came back later and I was all drugged up so I couldn't really talk, but was listening to him talk to the nurse and she told him about my incident.

More time passed and nothing happened. I was still contracting every minute, so they couldn't give me any more cytotech or any pitocin b/c they didn't want to stress my uterus, so we had to wait. At around 11pm, it was determined that I was fully effaced so they went ahead and broke my water to help dilation (still only 4cm). I went back to sleep and so did Doug.

An hour and a half or so later, I woke and felt like I needed to flip again, so I buzzed the nurse and she came in, decided to check me first. I was fully effaced/dilated, with the head "right there". When she said that I did feel a little pressure, but not much. I was dreading delivery b/c I couldn't feel anything and knew I was going to tear, badly. The nurse woke up Doug and told him we were going to get started. She called the dr and the nurses all came in and started setting up. It was very surreal. I was in perfect clarity, watching them set things up, and couldn't feel a thing. This was in direct opposition to Natalya's birth, when I was so focused on my body and Natalya that I didn't pay a whit of attention to what was going on around me. They raised my bed up to the bloody ceiling and put my legs up in the air. Doug was standing on my right, holding onto my arm. The head nurse comes over and asks me again if we want to see her before they take her to clean her up. Reminding us that she has a lot of fluid under her skin and that she won't look "normal". We say yes.

Okay, they tell me, and they start with the counting/pushing stuff. I pushed about 10 times or so, and out she came. I will never forget seeing her for the first time. She was blue and so tiny. Her eyes were shut and her lips were partially open. The nurse said "It's a girl" and showed her to us so we could see her body. Doug and I both started crying, gut-wrenching sobs. I don't know about him, but I felt like my heart had been ripped out. Doug and I hugged each other as best as we could with me being up in the air lying on a table and they covered her with a blanket and took her away. I remember being shocked when they covered even her face with the blanket, and had to remind myself she was not living.

The doctor starts stitching me up and I asked him if it was bad. He said yes. Great. He asked if I had had any other vaginal births. Yes I said, my daughter was 8lb 10oz. He was surprised. I guess I healed well. Doug finally let go of me and sat down, feeling light-headed. I asked the doctor if there was anything he could see at birth that may have caused her death. He said no, but asked if I was RH-. I said no and the nurse looked at my file and said, "She's AB+" meaning there couldn't be an RH incompatibility, so that wasn’t it. Then he asked if I was rubella immune and I said yes. So no, he didn't have any ideas. The doctors left and Doug and I were left alone.

A bit later, the nurse came in and cleaned me up, I was starting to get a little feeling in my right leg, thank goodness, but it was slow. She said I had a LOT of amniotic fluid and that it was a light brown color, instead of clear, but it didn't have an odor, so there was no infection. But that was a sign of something "wrong". Beyond that, we'd have to wait for autopsy and placenta pathology reports. She asked if we were ready to see her, and we said yes. She left and then came back with the baby.

We had talked about her name a little, and we decided on Margaret Elizabeth. Elizabeth after my grandmother and Margaret after Doug's grandmother.

They put her in a little gown and brought in a little memory box they made with her footprints and a "wisp" of her hair and some other things. She tells us she was 5lb 3oz and 16" long. A big girl for 31 weeks. We took some pictures of her and I held her for a while. I can still feel her in my arms. Sometimes, like now, when I think about her, it's as if there's a weight of baby in my arms, and that's when I feel something missing from my life. Doug then held her for a bit, then placed her back in the isolette, covering her with a blanket. I could see him struggle over whether or not to cover her face with the blanket, but he ended up not doing it. I was glad.