I Survived the Holiday Season!

***This entry was written back in January, but due to the chaos of constant pregnancy monitoring and daily life got in the way of posting this blog previously***

Since mid November of 2010 I’ve been dreading this holiday season.  That’s a whole lotta time to anticipate and fear the worst!  Since we learned about Stella’s declining health just before Thanksgiving in 2010 the holiday season started off on a very sad and depressing note and as we progressed closer to Christmas we were faced with nothing but bad news.  There was no holiday spirit in our house, no joy, no looking forward to future holidays with our little girl.  I was surrounded by a cold, bleak sadness deep to my core.  I tried to focus on the positive, that Stella was still with me, and have hope for my daughter’s future.  I tired to pretend to be in to Christmas by putting up our tree, but the darkness was too much for me to overcome and the fake holiday spirit weighed down on me even more.  My husband finally took over and placed lights on the tree while I sat on the couch watching and choking back tears. 

Then, out of no where, I got sick a week before Christmas.  Stella’s life was no longer in theoretical danger, it was about to come crashing to an end!  I was hospitalized the Monday before Christmas with HELLP syndrome and told Stella was too young and too small to survive and my health was in imminent danger with out her delivery.  If you’ve never found yourself in this situation it’s hard to imagine the willingness to die for your child’s survival, but I was assured her chances of her surviving with my rapidly declining health were slim to none and we would likely both be lost.  From that moment on there was no Christmas!  I spent the week in the hospital desperately praying for a miracle and both proud and tortured by Stella’s will to hold on to my womb with her tiny little being.  She held on for nearly 50 hours while the Doctors did everything they could think of to induce her birth.  She didn’t want to come out in to the World.  She knew it was too early to be born and wanted to stay safely inside my womb, but my body failed her. 

I was released from the hospital on Christmas Day in the middle of a huge snow storm.  The roads were in horrible conditions making the half hour drive a very tense and tedious hour and a half.  Once finally safe back home all I wanted to do was camp out on the couch in front of the fireplace with a cup of hot chocolate and cry, but the half decorated Christmas tree was staring back at me as a reminder of the day and we had all been robbed on any sense of normalcy, happiness or joy.  After my break down Trey stepped in again and threw a few decorations on the tree, hung our empty stockings from the mantle and moved the boxes of Christmas decorations that had been stacked in the living room laying in waiting.  He made a Christmas dinner with the groceries he ran out to get on Christmas Eve when we learned of the impending snow and we tried to take back a little piece of the Christmas we had lost along with Stella. 

We spent the rest of the week dealing with the funeral home, writing an obituary for our baby, cancelling OB appointments and planned a small memorial service for Stella on New Years Day.  All the while I was left wondering how I would ever survive the year, 2011, that lay before me?  More importantly, did I even want to?

Now that we have finally kissed 2011 good-bye and welcomed 2012 I guess it’s safe to say I survived!  It was tough in so many ways.  Some I hadn’t even anticipated being so difficult.  For the most part I think I survived mostly by allowing the currents to take me where ever they chose.  I didn’t fight the drowning sensations of having no control, but I also tried not to imagine where the flow was going to take me.  Maybe I just didn’t care where I ended up, so I had no vested interest one way or the other?  Of course it really wasn’t that simple.  We had become involved in twice monthly Perinatal Loss Support Groups as well as deeply involved in our volunteer work with the March of Dimes, so those both gave me a little direction to help steer my course.

My blasé attitude was forced to take the back burner in August once we learned I was carrying Stella’s tiny sibling.  No longer caring where I may end up or what may happen in my future was no longer an option.  After all now I had to consider the future of this growing being inside of me and could no longer just throw in the towel if I didn’t feel like being part of society on any given day.  But, you may be surprised to learn just how difficult it is to carry a baby after having to say a final good-bye to a previous baby.  Some people seem to think getting pregnant after a loss is such a wonderful blessing that the Mother should be floating around on cloud 9 with a perm grin tattooed to her face.  Oh, how I wish it was that simple! 

In many ways experiencing a subsequent pregnancy after a loss is like placing yourself in front of a firing squad every day and giving them the power to determine your faith with a coin toss.  Will today be the end of this baby’s future?  You begin to live every day faced with fear.  You can no longer hold that blind optimism that YOUR baby will grow to be perfectly healthy and get to enjoy the future you had planned.  Once you’ve had it ripped out from under you once you can never gain it back!  Had I fully understood this I may have planned the timing of this pregnancy out a little differently, but then maybe it’s one of those situations where you think you have a firm grasp on how difficult the situation will be only to discovers it’s far more traumatizing than you could have ever imagined?

Regardless, being pregnant with Sprout along almost the exact time schedule as with her big sister Stella really made our first holiday season a unique challenge!  We grieved for what we had lost.  I ached to have Stella with me for her 1^st Christmas. I wanted to erase the painful memories of the Christmas and New Years Day from the year before.  But at the same time I was torn by knowing Sprout was with me and if we got incredibly lucky she would be with us for the next holiday season as we celebrate Stella’s 2^nd Angelversary.  It was a big if and it felt like a shot in the dark, but it was the only joy I could find to hold on to.  We’ve been blessed to be able to hold on to Sprout thus far and she’s helped guide me through so that I can say, “I survived the holiday season!”

My, how time flies...

Geez, I knew I had been slacking on updating my blog but I didn’t realize it’s been nearly 2 ½ months since I wrote last! Of course I knew the end of September was crazy busy and I had been working hard to get through a quick trip to Atlanta for the French Bulldog National Specialty and then back home in time for the March of Dimes Signature Chefs Gala and Auction. Both of these things are very important to me since I volunteer with a French Bulldog rescue, French Bulldog Rescue Network, and am a Board Member with our local Pisgah Division of the March of Dimes.

The French Bulldog Rescue Network (FBRN) always set up a fundraising table at this yearly event, have several volunteers travel from far and wide to attend, and there is always a Rescue Parade. We’ve fostered a few dogs with FBRN and we’ve adopted three Frenchies, but I also used to do some major volunteer work with them and came in to contact with a great number of people who will bend over backwards to help get a French Bulldog in to a safe and loving environment, so it’s always nice to see some of the volunteers I’ve met before and meet some news ones face to face who are able to attend. This year was particularly important to me because of our eldest Frenchie, Smeagol, health problems. You see, Smeags is a very special soul who spent most of his life living in a rabbit hutch in a North Carolina puppymill, with scummy water, rarely feed and never received any positive attention or medical treatment. We’ve been blessed to have him in our lives since October 29, 2005 and though it took a little while for him to trust us, he’s learned a very different lifestyle and shows us every day that he is a unique character.

While I was pregnant with Stella last Fall Smeags health had been concerning us. He had a few spells that made his odd body wobbly, but he always seemed to recovery quickly and look at us like we were crazy for doting on him (just another of Smeags charming attributes). In early November of last year I went o bed nervous about the lab work for the Quad Screening I was scheduled to do in the morning and it took me a while to settle down enough for me to fall a sleep. It didn’t seem like I had been a sleep very long when I suddenly woke to a thrashing noise and hopped out of bed to find Smeags having a Grand Mal seizure. It took a while for the seizure activity to pass and I spent the next five minutes clearing away foam from his mouth to prevent him from choking and then sat trying to calm his confusion. We spent the next hour sitting with him, talking and comforting him until he slowly seemed to come back around to “himself” and the fear in his eyes lessened and we all decided to try to get a couple of hours of sleep before the alarm clock beeped. We took Smeags with us for my lab work and drove him to our vets to be checked out afterwards. My horrible suspicions were confirmed by our vet and Smeags most likely was suffering from a brain tumor.

Well, that was (now) over a year ago and knowing how limited his time is with the diagnosis of a brain tumor I knew I had to get him to the French Bulldog Nationals so he could make one last Rescue Parade and see all the FBRN volunteers who love him. We first booked our hotel room last October and I thought how fun it was going to be to take Stella and Smeags. I had even come up with a plan for them to both ride in a red wagon together, so they could enjoy all the dogs, people and activity, but things have changed. However, Smeags still enjoyed himself and all the attention he received and everyone seemed very happy to see the old man doing his thing!

I wondered on our drive down to Atlanta if any of my rescue volunteer friends would say anything about Stella, since most of them had read or heard about our experience, and I wondered how I would handle that. Deep down I knew I would rather them mention Stella rather than dodge the huge whole left in our hearts, but for the most part everyone remained silent. One volunteer friend during a quiet moment took me by the arms and spoke to me about the loss of my precious daughter. I can’t even remember exactly what she said because I was so surprised and then overcome with appreciation and tears, but she said commented along the lines that she was proud of me for talking about our loss and all the information I share with others and that she holds us in her heart. Besides seeing how much love Smeags received at Nationals, hearing someone have the courage and respect to speak to me about Stella made the whole trip worthwhile! My heart was very happy as we drove back home.

Wow, I guess I’ll have to catch you all up on the March of Dimes Gala next time! Don’t worry, I plan on posting it this weekend and hope not to allow so much time to pass between posts.

The Loss Never Goes Away…

Months have passed, oceans of tears of have been spilled, hugs exchanged, compassionate people have listened and stories have been shared, but there is still an ache left behind that will never go away. When you loss a baby, like I’ve lost my sweet Stella, not only have you lost a part of you, but you’ve lost all the dreams, hopes and future, too. It’s impossible for anyone who hasn’t experienced such a loss to fully understand.

It’s not the same as loosing Grandpa at 65 years old to a heart attack. Of course loosing anyone you love is painful and difficult, but people will still talk about Grandpa, his memory, his life and all the family and friends he’s left behind. They have photos to flip through to sweeten their memories and good times together to cherish. When someone looses a baby, no matter whether through miscarriage, stillbirth or infant loss those memories are very few and far between. No one wants to talk about the babies who have been lost, but it's sweet music to their Moms ears when someone is willing to remember them by speaking aloud. We have to focus on the time we had them in our lives the longest ~ while they were growing in our bellies! How we shared our pregnancy together, the special songs we made up to sing to them, our conversations together as we fell asleep, our dreams and hopes for their future that we shared with our bellies, the milestones we experienced, the first kicks and their reactions to certain foods. These aren’t memories that our families and friends can share with us. We are completely alone with our special memories to cherish!

Not only have we lost the chance to hold our babies, but we’ve been robbed the opportunity to create new memories. I’ll never know the color of Stella’s eyes or what makes them sparkle with happiness, what her smile looks like, the sound of her giggle, her favorite color, or if she would have been a Daddy’s girl? I’ll never know if she enjoyed going on walks in the woods, either in a carrier or as a toddler or child? Would she have smiled at the sight of a deer in the woods like I do? I'll never have the joy of baking and decorating a birthday cake for my sweet girl and throwing her a party. I wonder would she have preferred vanilla (like her Dad) or chocolate (like me)? Maybe Stella would have shown us her independent streak and chosen strawberry instead? Would she enjoy family drives on the Parkway to take in the beauty and enjoy a picnic together? I wish I knew the answers, but I’ll never know! The curiosity and wonder will always haunt me! I wish I had the chance to discover each of these things about Stella because they would all fill me with precious, cherished memories of time we had together! Instead I have a few photos, her stamped footprints, her ashes and a broken heart!

Exposing Myself

It's a subject many people would rather avoid and if brought up the general population just doesn't know how to respond.  I guess that is why I feel the need to talk about it, even if it's here where no one is actually reading.  I want people to know ~ I am a Baby Loss Momma!  What exactly is a Baby Loss Momma?  Well, sadly it's a Mother who had many hopes and dreams for a baby they carried, but were unable to bring home in their arms and fulfill those wishes.  You can learn more about my experience by reading Stella's story on Faces of Loss, Faces of Hope.

I'm very lucky to have found Faces of Loss, Faces of Hope as a resource and confirmation that I am not alone in my grief and suffering!  Tragically there are way to many women and families who have been directly touched by the loss of baby or infant!  Thanks to Faces, other online groups and perinatal loss support groups I have found myself surrounded by a community of Baby Loss Families.  We are given a chance to remember our babies, what it felt like to carry them, our deepest desires for their lives, talk about our experiences with complicated pregnancies or births and share our children with each other.  Some of us aren't even able to do this with our families or friends because they truly don't understand, but we are able to find comfort in those who had been strangers until we all found ourselves in the same situations.  It's a horrible place to be, but I am very thankful I am not here alone!