Monday, May 11, 2009
Death is a complicated phenomenon in which no one person likes to "re-live". It's a series of deperate emotions to which little comfort comes. The gaping hole in ones heart is too big to be fully repaired. It's that piece of my heart that remains with my daughter who is now in heaven. This is Lexis's story, her short journal if you will, of her process to come to earth and her brief, life experience.
I am not good at verbally explaining my emotions and how I feel. Since it is hard for me to talk out loud and explain my feelings, it helps to write it down. I know a lot of people are curious about what happened so I will do my best at explaining. This is not written to make anyone sad by any means, but to inform and let anybody else out there that has had this happen know, that the emotions you feel from the loss of a baby are not to be dismissed simply because of the shortness of life. The emotions are felt simply because of the hopes and dreams your baby will not be fulfilled at this time. Even with the complications we were aware of before her birth, death was the farthest from my mind. I almost felt prepared to take on the challenges of our sweet daughter, but nothing could have prepared me for her passing.
Waking up at three in the morning is of course no ones favorite time, unfortunately, this is where her story begins. I wake up to the sound of shattering glass. I sit straight up and look at the clock, 3:00 A.M. My heart is pounding and I wondered what had happened. I ask Clint to help me search the house for the source or the all too alarming crash. We were both dumbfounded as to what it was. I lay back down and begin to relax. My breathing slows and my heart is no longer racing. After a good five minutes, I feel something warm tickling my hand. It scares me, so I sit straight up and it happened. My water broke. I flipped on the light and realized I was surrounded in a pool of red water. I was bleeding severely.
We were ten minutes away from a small town, one level hospital, that had not kept up with new technological advances. We were aware that throughout the pregnancy that there were many complications and anomalies with our sweet baby girl. For one, it was not possible for me to have the baby normally. Due to hydrocephalus, her head was twice the size that would be allowed for a normal vaginal birth. She had to be taken C-section. For another factor, only the best of the best doctors were going to perform surgeries on the baby shortly after delivery. We had spent a lot of time each week during the pregnancy at the hospital doing fetal MRI's, in depth ultrasounds, amniocentesis ( I was measuring 52 weeks at 28 because of the severe polyhydramnios-excessive amniotic fluid), blood work and everything imaginable.
After I saw all the red, I yell to my husband. He sits up and he jumps out of bed to grab a phone. He tells me to call my doctor while he got a few things together. She tells me to call 911 and to come by ambulance or they could send a helicopter to our little hospital. I dial 911 and start apologizing profusely to my husband that this was happening. I don't know why I was apologizing. Maybe it was the surreal incoherent feeling kicking in. I was shaking so violently, I could hardly hold the phone. The emergency staff answered and I quickly explained my situation. They notified two hospitals that I would be to one of them shortly. The plan would first be to assess the situation. The contractions started coming a little stronger and more even. The emergency team arrived. They immediately realized that my situation was mre complicated than what they had come prepared for. They didn't have much time and rush me straight to the best hospital with the best personnel waiting for me. That ride in the ambulance was the longest ride of my life (and the most expensive). My shaking became uncontrollable and fear took over my body. I silently prayed to get to the hospital without my baby dying and without me losing too much blood. My body was calmed and the Lord comforted me. Suddenly, I realized that the shattering sound (which we later found out, was our light fixture, in the bathroom, that had come out of the wall and fallen against our mirror) was no "coincident", but a sheer miracle from our Father in Heaven. Had I not already been awake, I wouldn't have woken up to a small trickle of fluid and blood. I might have not had the chance to meet my baby girl. I got to the hospital without any evident problems along the way. They run me through the hospital doors on a gurney, just like you would see on T.V. I am taken into a room full of many doctors dressed, masked, and ready to deliver this child. They check the babies heart beat and immediately they know this baby needs to come out. They put a rush order on everything. They put anesthesia in my I.V. and put a mask over my face. A lady pinches my airway to put a breathing tube in. I can hardly breathe and I start to panic. I slowly fade out and remember nothing more until hours later when they wheel me up to the neonatal intensive care unit. I can hear voices and pick up certain sentences, though I am not fully coherent. Voice 1 (my doctor) "We don't mean for these things to happen, they just do." I force my eyes open cause I knew things weren't good. I caught my doctors eyes, and recognized the moisture dripping out from them. My husband was on the other side of our daughter. He reaches for my hand. I can't understand completely, but I feel like crying. I fade back out. I am awoken again by a doctor, asking me if I would like to see my daughter. I can't open my eyes, but I nod my head anyways. They raise my bed to her level and they coax me to open my all too heavy sedated eyelids. I look over and see my angel. There was nothing else to describe her. She was perfect. Conversations between doctors began filling my mind. I look across my babies bed and see my husband with wet, red eyes. I ask him to tell me what was going to happen to her. He told me that the doctors told him there was nothing they could do with all the complications. Ultimately, she would not survive. Her brain had an absence of the corpus colosum and was not developed correctly. Her lungs had lots of scar tissue and were underdeveloped even after the steroid shots during gestation and being almost full-term. She was hooked up to life support. Until we gave our word, she would hopefully remain alive with the machines. Even with the support, she was deteriorating fast. I felt the blood drain from my face. It had been hard at first to take the news early on in the pregnancy that indeed things would not be normal. I had stressed and worried, but finally came to terms with what was to come. I actually became eager to help her and pull together as a family to help her every step of the way. I felt somewhat prepared and ready to take on the challenges that lay ahead. The challenge of losing a loved one. After receiving the news and information from the doctors, I silently cried. The tears flowed from my eyes though I felt numb and could make no noise. I reached over and held her hand. It was so soft, warm, and perfect. How could such a sweet spirit and perfect looking body have so many physical problems on the inside. I had so much hope and optimism that I was absolutely devastated to find out she would only live a short while. It was hard to think after carrying and bonding with Alexis for nine months, preparing for her birth, shopping for baby items, feeling her kick and move, and all the other joys that go along with getting ready for a baby, were all for not. I was planning a celebration of a new life only to do a quick 180 and plan for her death. My efforts of questioning the doctors had been exhausted by the intensive care specialists when they expressed their sorrow and said that there was nothing that could be done. I don't know how or when it happened, but I fell asleep holding my daughters hand and woke up in a completely different room. The nurses would not let me see my baby until I was more stable and awake. I regretted the feeling of being so heavily medicated because I knew my time with my daughter was extremely short. It was a horribly awful time to feel like sleeping. It wasn't until a little later on that they gave us the news that there wasn't much time left. I wanted so badly to hold her. It took all the energy I had to tell them to unhook me from the morphine pump and all the other I.V.'s so that I could go up and hold my daughter. I was so tired I could barely talk. I was now in great physical and emotional pain. i struggled horribly to get up from my bed and into a wheelchair. The violent shaking came back and hurt more than ever. They gave me shots and covered me with multiple warm blankets, and wheeled me up to the N.I.C.U. We entered the room and ther she was. They said they could take her off everything so that we could hold and spend time with her, or they could keep her there until she passed away, which was a short ways off. The machine was now useless and not helping her at all. My husband and I prayed about it and we knew that we should take this opportunity to hold her and kiss her while she was still alive. It was the hardest decision I've eever had to make. We were wheeled to a special room and I was able to hold her. My newborn baby was so warm to hold. Her skin was a perfect peach color and so soft to the touch. She had a little bit of curly black hair, and her facial features resembled Clint. I sobbed as I watched my poor daughter gasp and struggle for any breath possible. She weezed and choked over and over. The tears freely spilt down my soaked cheeks and onto her blanket. I looked at my husband and my emotions were mirroed in his face as he to silently cried in desperation. Again, the medicine and the days events began to again take over my worn out body. The blood loss also added to my fatigue. I began to fall asleep-trying to fight it with everything I had to stay awake for just a few more moments. I became extremely frustrated and angry because I knew my time was short, but I couldn't keep my eyes open to watch my daughter. The nurses moved me to a bed and laid her wrapped up in my left arm next to the bed. I cried until sleep over took me. I woke up a little while later to a nurse checking both our vitals. My dear sweet baby daughter had become ice cold in my arms and near death evident on her purple lips. Her strong hear was still beating, but her breaths became more troubled, and more few and far between. I reached over in a frustrated attempt to try to warm her small, frail body, but my hands too turned cold in trying. I talked to her and let her know how much I loved her. I let her know how much I was going to miss her. I was not as tired now, and lay wide awake. She was heavily sedated so that she would feel no pain. She was in a deep sleep in which she would never come out of. In that moment, she opened her eyes and looked at me. For a good 30 minutes we stared into each others eyes and created a bond between mother and daughter. She searched my face as if to find out the problem. She then looked me straight in the eyes as if to say "Mom, don't worry. I have come from our Heavenly Father to receive a body. It was just part of the process. You knew this would happen before you came to earth. It was all part of the plan, you just can't remember. I will be happy in heaven with other family members and with my Father in Heaven. Don't worry about me, I will be close to you always and will be helping with the work on the other side. I will miss you too, but don't cry cause we will see each other again." She then drifted back off to sleep and finally I felt and overwhelming peace-I too fell asleep with her in my arms and her tiny perfect hand wrappen around my finger. I woke a couple hours later to a nurse entering the room. I instantly reached over to feel my daughters heart. It had stopped beating. She was now up in heaven again where I know she is happy.
Sometimes I wake up and think I hear a newborn cry. I jump-up frantic with excitement thinking maybe it was all a bad dream. Then reality sets in and I relive the horrible emotions over and over again. My arms literally ache with such strong desire to hold Alexis again. My emtional pain becomes so strong at times that it literally hurts physically. My chest/heart aches with such strange and twisted pain that no remedy can even come close to calming my pains. My heart breaks again and my breathing becomes restricted. It seems silly, but a song I could refer to this feeling to is Taylor Swifts song "I can't breathe without you, but I have too...". The loss of Alexis has been a hard road. Any mention of the word baby brings on the hurt all over again and I sink down. I constantly am reminded by something each day of the day I held her in my arms as she struggled for life. She suffered and there was nothing I could do to help or save her. It hurts. It feels like the weight of the world is upon me and I am being crushed under the weight. I am now waiting my time for that weight to be easier and easier to carry, because it will never go away. What has happened will always be and nothing can change that. It simply can't be fixed. I have learned that these feelings are not ones of faithlessness, but feelings that are necessary to experience in order to fully grieve, and to gain faith and experience. It happened all too fast, but I am so grateful I was able to see her and hold her while she was alive. I truly know that she was too perfect to have to prove herself on this earth. She had already proven herself worthy, but just needed a body. A perfect spirit, with an imperfect body. She will be completely perfect when I see her again. I will be able to raise her. I am grateful for the gospel and can't imagine going through this without it. I can't imagine not knowing where she was, of if I would see her again. I am lucky to know that I will. Most of all, I know I am blessed because I have a little angel watching over me.
Thanks to everyone who has shared this experience with us. They say when a joy is shared, it is multiplied, and when a sorrow is shared, it is divided. I whole heartedly believe this and thank all who have helped us.
I am not good at verbally explaining my emotions and how I feel. Since it is hard for me to talk out loud and explain my feelings, it helps to write it down. I know a lot of people are curious about what happened so I will do my best at explaining. This is not written to make anyone sad by any means, but to inform and let anybody else out there that has had this happen know, that the emotions you feel from the loss of a baby are not to be dismissed simply because of the shortness of life. The emotions are felt simply because of the hopes and dreams your baby will not be fulfilled at this time. Even with the complications we were aware of before her birth, death was the farthest from my mind. I almost felt prepared to take on the challenges of our sweet daughter, but nothing could have prepared me for her passing.
Waking up at three in the morning is of course no ones favorite time, unfortunately, this is where her story begins. I wake up to the sound of shattering glass. I sit straight up and look at the clock, 3:00 A.M. My heart is pounding and I wondered what had happened. I ask Clint to help me search the house for the source or the all too alarming crash. We were both dumbfounded as to what it was. I lay back down and begin to relax. My breathing slows and my heart is no longer racing. After a good five minutes, I feel something warm tickling my hand. It scares me, so I sit straight up and it happened. My water broke. I flipped on the light and realized I was surrounded in a pool of red water. I was bleeding severely.
We were ten minutes away from a small town, one level hospital, that had not kept up with new technological advances. We were aware that throughout the pregnancy that there were many complications and anomalies with our sweet baby girl. For one, it was not possible for me to have the baby normally. Due to hydrocephalus, her head was twice the size that would be allowed for a normal vaginal birth. She had to be taken C-section. For another factor, only the best of the best doctors were going to perform surgeries on the baby shortly after delivery. We had spent a lot of time each week during the pregnancy at the hospital doing fetal MRI's, in depth ultrasounds, amniocentesis ( I was measuring 52 weeks at 28 because of the severe polyhydramnios-excessive amniotic fluid), blood work and everything imaginable.
After I saw all the red, I yell to my husband. He sits up and he jumps out of bed to grab a phone. He tells me to call my doctor while he got a few things together. She tells me to call 911 and to come by ambulance or they could send a helicopter to our little hospital. I dial 911 and start apologizing profusely to my husband that this was happening. I don't know why I was apologizing. Maybe it was the surreal incoherent feeling kicking in. I was shaking so violently, I could hardly hold the phone. The emergency staff answered and I quickly explained my situation. They notified two hospitals that I would be to one of them shortly. The plan would first be to assess the situation. The contractions started coming a little stronger and more even. The emergency team arrived. They immediately realized that my situation was mre complicated than what they had come prepared for. They didn't have much time and rush me straight to the best hospital with the best personnel waiting for me. That ride in the ambulance was the longest ride of my life (and the most expensive). My shaking became uncontrollable and fear took over my body. I silently prayed to get to the hospital without my baby dying and without me losing too much blood. My body was calmed and the Lord comforted me. Suddenly, I realized that the shattering sound (which we later found out, was our light fixture, in the bathroom, that had come out of the wall and fallen against our mirror) was no "coincident", but a sheer miracle from our Father in Heaven. Had I not already been awake, I wouldn't have woken up to a small trickle of fluid and blood. I might have not had the chance to meet my baby girl. I got to the hospital without any evident problems along the way. They run me through the hospital doors on a gurney, just like you would see on T.V. I am taken into a room full of many doctors dressed, masked, and ready to deliver this child. They check the babies heart beat and immediately they know this baby needs to come out. They put a rush order on everything. They put anesthesia in my I.V. and put a mask over my face. A lady pinches my airway to put a breathing tube in. I can hardly breathe and I start to panic. I slowly fade out and remember nothing more until hours later when they wheel me up to the neonatal intensive care unit. I can hear voices and pick up certain sentences, though I am not fully coherent. Voice 1 (my doctor) "We don't mean for these things to happen, they just do." I force my eyes open cause I knew things weren't good. I caught my doctors eyes, and recognized the moisture dripping out from them. My husband was on the other side of our daughter. He reaches for my hand. I can't understand completely, but I feel like crying. I fade back out. I am awoken again by a doctor, asking me if I would like to see my daughter. I can't open my eyes, but I nod my head anyways. They raise my bed to her level and they coax me to open my all too heavy sedated eyelids. I look over and see my angel. There was nothing else to describe her. She was perfect. Conversations between doctors began filling my mind. I look across my babies bed and see my husband with wet, red eyes. I ask him to tell me what was going to happen to her. He told me that the doctors told him there was nothing they could do with all the complications. Ultimately, she would not survive. Her brain had an absence of the corpus colosum and was not developed correctly. Her lungs had lots of scar tissue and were underdeveloped even after the steroid shots during gestation and being almost full-term. She was hooked up to life support. Until we gave our word, she would hopefully remain alive with the machines. Even with the support, she was deteriorating fast. I felt the blood drain from my face. It had been hard at first to take the news early on in the pregnancy that indeed things would not be normal. I had stressed and worried, but finally came to terms with what was to come. I actually became eager to help her and pull together as a family to help her every step of the way. I felt somewhat prepared and ready to take on the challenges that lay ahead. The challenge of losing a loved one. After receiving the news and information from the doctors, I silently cried. The tears flowed from my eyes though I felt numb and could make no noise. I reached over and held her hand. It was so soft, warm, and perfect. How could such a sweet spirit and perfect looking body have so many physical problems on the inside. I had so much hope and optimism that I was absolutely devastated to find out she would only live a short while. It was hard to think after carrying and bonding with Alexis for nine months, preparing for her birth, shopping for baby items, feeling her kick and move, and all the other joys that go along with getting ready for a baby, were all for not. I was planning a celebration of a new life only to do a quick 180 and plan for her death. My efforts of questioning the doctors had been exhausted by the intensive care specialists when they expressed their sorrow and said that there was nothing that could be done. I don't know how or when it happened, but I fell asleep holding my daughters hand and woke up in a completely different room. The nurses would not let me see my baby until I was more stable and awake. I regretted the feeling of being so heavily medicated because I knew my time with my daughter was extremely short. It was a horribly awful time to feel like sleeping. It wasn't until a little later on that they gave us the news that there wasn't much time left. I wanted so badly to hold her. It took all the energy I had to tell them to unhook me from the morphine pump and all the other I.V.'s so that I could go up and hold my daughter. I was so tired I could barely talk. I was now in great physical and emotional pain. i struggled horribly to get up from my bed and into a wheelchair. The violent shaking came back and hurt more than ever. They gave me shots and covered me with multiple warm blankets, and wheeled me up to the N.I.C.U. We entered the room and ther she was. They said they could take her off everything so that we could hold and spend time with her, or they could keep her there until she passed away, which was a short ways off. The machine was now useless and not helping her at all. My husband and I prayed about it and we knew that we should take this opportunity to hold her and kiss her while she was still alive. It was the hardest decision I've eever had to make. We were wheeled to a special room and I was able to hold her. My newborn baby was so warm to hold. Her skin was a perfect peach color and so soft to the touch. She had a little bit of curly black hair, and her facial features resembled Clint. I sobbed as I watched my poor daughter gasp and struggle for any breath possible. She weezed and choked over and over. The tears freely spilt down my soaked cheeks and onto her blanket. I looked at my husband and my emotions were mirroed in his face as he to silently cried in desperation. Again, the medicine and the days events began to again take over my worn out body. The blood loss also added to my fatigue. I began to fall asleep-trying to fight it with everything I had to stay awake for just a few more moments. I became extremely frustrated and angry because I knew my time was short, but I couldn't keep my eyes open to watch my daughter. The nurses moved me to a bed and laid her wrapped up in my left arm next to the bed. I cried until sleep over took me. I woke up a little while later to a nurse checking both our vitals. My dear sweet baby daughter had become ice cold in my arms and near death evident on her purple lips. Her strong hear was still beating, but her breaths became more troubled, and more few and far between. I reached over in a frustrated attempt to try to warm her small, frail body, but my hands too turned cold in trying. I talked to her and let her know how much I loved her. I let her know how much I was going to miss her. I was not as tired now, and lay wide awake. She was heavily sedated so that she would feel no pain. She was in a deep sleep in which she would never come out of. In that moment, she opened her eyes and looked at me. For a good 30 minutes we stared into each others eyes and created a bond between mother and daughter. She searched my face as if to find out the problem. She then looked me straight in the eyes as if to say "Mom, don't worry. I have come from our Heavenly Father to receive a body. It was just part of the process. You knew this would happen before you came to earth. It was all part of the plan, you just can't remember. I will be happy in heaven with other family members and with my Father in Heaven. Don't worry about me, I will be close to you always and will be helping with the work on the other side. I will miss you too, but don't cry cause we will see each other again." She then drifted back off to sleep and finally I felt and overwhelming peace-I too fell asleep with her in my arms and her tiny perfect hand wrappen around my finger. I woke a couple hours later to a nurse entering the room. I instantly reached over to feel my daughters heart. It had stopped beating. She was now up in heaven again where I know she is happy.
Sometimes I wake up and think I hear a newborn cry. I jump-up frantic with excitement thinking maybe it was all a bad dream. Then reality sets in and I relive the horrible emotions over and over again. My arms literally ache with such strong desire to hold Alexis again. My emtional pain becomes so strong at times that it literally hurts physically. My chest/heart aches with such strange and twisted pain that no remedy can even come close to calming my pains. My heart breaks again and my breathing becomes restricted. It seems silly, but a song I could refer to this feeling to is Taylor Swifts song "I can't breathe without you, but I have too...". The loss of Alexis has been a hard road. Any mention of the word baby brings on the hurt all over again and I sink down. I constantly am reminded by something each day of the day I held her in my arms as she struggled for life. She suffered and there was nothing I could do to help or save her. It hurts. It feels like the weight of the world is upon me and I am being crushed under the weight. I am now waiting my time for that weight to be easier and easier to carry, because it will never go away. What has happened will always be and nothing can change that. It simply can't be fixed. I have learned that these feelings are not ones of faithlessness, but feelings that are necessary to experience in order to fully grieve, and to gain faith and experience. It happened all too fast, but I am so grateful I was able to see her and hold her while she was alive. I truly know that she was too perfect to have to prove herself on this earth. She had already proven herself worthy, but just needed a body. A perfect spirit, with an imperfect body. She will be completely perfect when I see her again. I will be able to raise her. I am grateful for the gospel and can't imagine going through this without it. I can't imagine not knowing where she was, of if I would see her again. I am lucky to know that I will. Most of all, I know I am blessed because I have a little angel watching over me.
Thanks to everyone who has shared this experience with us. They say when a joy is shared, it is multiplied, and when a sorrow is shared, it is divided. I whole heartedly believe this and thank all who have helped us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)