My Confession

Before I share the most horrifying thing that I've ever thought, let me be clear - it was a THOUGHT - not an action. It was a horrible thought at a horrible time in my life and yet one of the BEST things came out of it.

The birth story of my son is one where nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong - and not just the birth - a lot of things happened in the 6 months after his birth that made it the hardest year of my life.

To start, my son's pregnancy started out with every indication that it wouldn't last. I was a lucky (or not so lucky) woman that had continuous bleeding for the first 16 weeks of the pregnancy. With the miscarriages before my daughter and the one in between my children, I was prepared to lose my son too. When we got to the 24 week viability, I breathed a sigh of relief and carefully scheduled out all my prenatal visits to not interfere with our upcoming move.

I planned to take some time off to be with my daughter right before the 4th of July so that we could participate in swim lessons at the local pool. She had an ear infection and couldn't take the class - but they refunded our money, so we just had some bonding time instead. Then she and and her dad were going to go to a family wedding while I stayed behind to pack.

When my husband and my daughter left for the wedding, I felt well. I had planned what items I could pack up, what items I needed to leave behind, and what items really needed to be thrown away. My dad and stepmom came over and we did things like wash the curtains and hang them back up to dry. There was absolutely no indication that my life would topple in the middle of the night on July 8th, 2012. But - when I woke up, I felt horrible. I had every single symptom of pre-eclampsia. My stepmom and dad had given me a blood pressure monitor - and my numbers skyrocketed. I can't remember the numbers for sure, but I am thinking in the range of 189/120. The pain in my upper right abdomen was awful and my vision suffered. When I called the hospital to see if I should go in, they said, "If you're worried, we can hook you up to the monitor." It was matter-of-fact, no emotion.

I was struggling at this point to figure out how in the world I could love someone as much as I loved my daughter. My thoughts on going to the hospital weren't whether or not the baby growing inside me would survive, but whether I would survive to be there for my daughter.

Once at the hospital, the monitors hooked up, and the baby moving, I got admitted. Indefinitely. My blood pressure wasn't going down and there was absolutely no way that this baby would be born term. In fact, he was born at 30 weeks and 5 days. Two days shy of being able to hold him right away.

The list of things that went wrong with his birth included having pre-eclampsia, my placenta abrupting, my baby not only wrapping the cord around his neck, but also tying a knot in it, and being born 10 weeks before his due date. To quote the doctor, "The baby needed to be born - for both your sake."

The birth story is horrifying, right? But that's not even the worst part of this six month period of time! The worst part was the postpartum depression (PPD) that I still deal with to this day. My PPD started early after delivery. I don't remember much of the first day of my son's life because he was not near me, but I remember anger. I remember rage. I remember sadness. I remember thinking, "maybe I should just use the Safe Haven law," which is the biggest confession that I have. I almost walked away from my baby boy.