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Grief Healing Discussion Groups

RyansMom21809

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  • Date of Death
    2/18/09
  • Name/Location of Hospice if they were involved:
    NA
  1. I just got back from my 2 week post op check up with my doctor to see how I'm doing since my c-section. She briefly looked at my stitches (which by the way she said were healing very well) but most of the appointment we talked about how I was doing as well as some preliminary results from the autopsy and cord/placenta testing they did. Apparently the only thing they could find wrong with Ryan was that he had a virus call CMV. Its a very common virus and something like 60-80% of American's already have it, and its commonly picked up in hospitals or childcare centers. Guess what my job is...I'm a PreK teacher. According to research babies who acquire this virus in utero can often go on to live perfectly normal lives, or in the least be born healthy and eventually show small (usually insignificant) signs of having the virus. Unfortunately, in my case, a small number of babies can be miscarried or stillborn because of the virus. I have to go back in after my 6 week check up and get a blood test to see for sure whether I have that virus. All I can think now is I choose to work with kids - because I love working with kids...and what do I get?? I lose my baby. I blame myself even more now...how can I not? Even if it wasn’t in my control, in the end that was MY baby, and he was in ME...no one else could protect him but me and apparently I couldn't do that. I am also furious at the fact that this virus is so common and can cause such damage if picked up during pregnancy and yet doctors don’t test for it and they don’t warn patients about it. All I would have had to have been told is to be extremely careful at work around urine and saliva. Taking 100x more precautions than I already take could have saved my son but no one told me there was such a virus and that I needed to be concerned about it. This is something that everypregnant women should be told.
  2. It’s been 11 days since my baby died. I was 6 1/2 months pregnant. My little Ryan had been extremely active ever since I first started feeling him move...but there were days when he wouldn't move around 22 or 23 weeks and I was told that was normal. So Monday when I didn't feel him move after mid morning right at 26 weeks I was concerned but was told sometimes they just don’t move all the time. The following day I felt nothing and took myself into Labor and Delivery. Upon getting checked in they found his heartbeat, a strong 120...however I remember the Doctor saying she'd prefer to see more "variation"....I guess it would have been better if it was moving around more. The doctor had a full ultrasound done and in the 45 minutes the ultrasound tech was doing it he didn't see my baby move once...not a finger or a toe or even the appearance of his chest going up and down - and yet his heart continued to beat. A few hours later though his heartbeat gradually began to go down...115, 110, and eventually they thought that his heartbeat was very close to mine, which was in the low 90's. They immediately took me in for an emergency c-section when it dipped that low. (The baby's father believes they had lost his heartbeat for a while, I don’t know what to believe). The c-section was over within 10-15 minutes and my baby was stillborn. They tried to recessitate him but there was no chance of bringing him back. All my original blood tests came back normal and in the mean time I am waiting on a full panel of test results including placenta and cord testing as well as an autopsy. One thing that I was told was that I have a heart shaped uterus, but according to my doctor it isn't a very bad one and it wouldn't have been the cause of what happened and it shouldn't have any effect on future pregnancies...but it scares me. After the c-section, I was in the hospital for 3 and a half days, during which I got to spend as much time with my son as I wanted. At first I thought this was a crazy idea but those precious moments I got with him in those days are all I will ever get to hold on to. Plus, we got the opportunity to get some pictures which we may never look at or maybe we'll cling to them - who knows? The hospital was great, they helped us get foot prints and even called someone in to make molds of my baby boy’s feet...they also made us a birth certificate, since technically we don’t get one since he never took a breath. I didn't cry until the night I got home from the hospital. It hit me in a wave...I had just left my baby all alone to be stored in a freezing cold morgue until someone could cut him open to perform an autopsy. It took everything inside of me to not get into the car (which since having had a c-section and being heavily drugged would have been a tremendously bad thing to do) and drive to the hospital to see him again. In the days since then I've been trying to stay as busy as I possibly can (reading books on grieving...creating a website in memorial to my baby boy, etc), which isn't very much seeing as I'm supposed to be resting for the next few weeks. But if I stop for two seconds I have a panic attack. I miss my baby. Yesterday there was a memorial.......but yesterday was supposed to be the day I got my 3D ultrasound pictures. I'm not supposed to be grieving the loss of a son I never got to know. I'm not supposed to be worrying about no one remembering him but me. Or people belittling my loss because I never got to be "attached" to my child. No one can "remember" him...except for me and Joe (Ryan's farther). And really all Joe can remember was the Ryan we got to spend time with at the hospital, and that’s not the Ryan I think of. It’s weird and hard to explain to anyone else except to say that when you have someone growing inside you, you feel like you already know them. I knew what time of day Ryan kicked the most, I knew that he liked to be on the left side of my tummy and I knew that if I put headphones on my tummy and put a certain track of a classical CD I have on he'd start to kick like crazy. So even though I didn't know the color of his eyes or the sound of his laugh...I knew a different baby than the one they gave to me. It’s still hard for me to admit that that was my baby. In the hospital I held him as much as I could bare to...but I never told him I loved him, now I wish I did...and I never kissed him, now I wish I did. I felt like I was holding a doll...I felt like I was going to wake up and it would be some horrible nightmare. I’m sure where ever my baby is he knows how much I love him but I wish I could go back in time and express that more when I had him with me. I loved my child from the second I found out I was pregnant. All I ever wanted was for him to be healthy and for some unknown reason this had to happen. I am so angry and sad and I don’t know how to move foreword. I don’t see myself being able to move forward. I know people say it takes time, but I want my baby back...I'll always want my baby back. I just don’t know where to go from here...I feel so alone in my grieving for this baby, like no one else can truly understand because he was inside me and I was the only one who knew him in any way when he was alive.......... I’m going a bit insane with everything going through my mind right now. I actually experienced some very mild bleeding at two different points during my pregnancy. Both times it wasn't even enough to fill a quarter of a panty liner but even so it scared the hell out of me. I was told "sometimes this just happens, its kind of a wait and see game" and both times nothing ever happened.......the last time that even happened was 2 months before I lost Ryan so it was completely unrelated but still for the remainder of my pregnancy I would check to make sure I wasn't bleeding every single time I went to the bathroom. Now I can’t help but wonder “what if?” about absolutely everything that I did during my pregnancy. What if I should have never taken baths? What if the one soda in a blue moon I allowed myself hurt my baby? Or…I got a pedicure a few weeks ago, was it the fumes? Or…I went into a casino for about an hour one night...did I inhale smoke and kill my baby? Or...I got a spider bite a few weeks ago...should I have taken that more seriously and gotten it checked out? Or the fact that it bothered me that at the doctors office I went to I had been seeing a Nurse Practitionerevery check up until later in the pregnancy when I would have started to regularly see a Doctor...did that Nurse do something wrong? She was very nonchalant about the few bleeding episodes and always seemed so busy...what if something could have been prevented??? I saw her only 5 days before I lost him…why didn’t she notice something was wrong? She barely gave me the time of day. She found the baby’s heart beat and since I had bronchitis she prescribed me some Robitussin, the whole appointment lasted no more than 5-10 minutes...and should I even have been taking that??? Or did me getting sick make him sick? Or what if I had come in to the hospital on Monday instead of Tuesday, could they have done something different? Or what if we had insisted they do the c-section immediately instead of waiting attached to the fetal monitor to see if there were any changes??? These questions keep circling around in my head and I feel a bit insane at times. I'm worried that whenever I get pregnant again I'll be afraid to leave my bed. I think I might have to buy one of those professional fetal heart monitors so I can hear his heartbeat whenever I need to. Although that wouldn't even have helped in my case because his heartbeat was there right up until the very last minute going into my c-section. I know people must think I'm crazy...my baby has only been gone 11 days and I'm thinking about having another one. But really that idea has been the absolute only thing to help me make it through my days. It terrifies me that something like this could happen again...but then I read so many stories about people having children after a miscarriage or a still birth and that’s all I want. I feel empty right now. I hate to look at my body because my boobs are starting to shrink as the milk dries up, and my stomach is slowly deflating - I can see my toes again but I'm not supposed to be able to right now. I think the worst part of the physical part is the fact that I am going to have a permanent scar to remind me I lost my son. Emotionally though all I can think is that as soon as it’s physically possible I want to be pregnant again. I would never dream of having a child to "replace" Ryan...because that simply isn't possible and I know that, I really do. But I was very, very ready to be a mom. More ready than most people - even at my age. Even when I was younger I always just wanted to be a mommy. I would be content being a soccer mom and having 5 kids and just taking care of them. Not that I don’t have career and life goals for myself but being a mom has always been number one on my list of things to do. That idea is what I cling to when I feel like everything is falling apart. I don’t know if that's healthy...I'm sure it’s probably not, but I feel like it’s all I have. Is there anyone at all who has gone through anything even semi-similar...and if so would you mind sharing your story and how did you managed?
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