Hold Everything Lightly #13 {The Baby The Hard Way}

To want a baby and not be able to have one can drive a woman to the edge. Over the edge. When I was in my late twenties I went through an expensive infertility work up.  I prayed the prayer of Hannah of old many times. To anyone going through this process now keep waiting for the miracle. Here is my story.

I was married to Stephen, working full time as a registered nurse at the medical university and going to college at night to get another nursing degree. If you work in an institution of higher learning it is expected of you to get advanced degrees. It is a matter of status and prestige. Yet my heart was not in it. I wanted a baby. Going to class for hours each evening was making me miserable. My pay would increase perhaps a dollar an hour which was not entirely worth the effort. I have never been concerned with prestige or status. I was concerned with providing excellent patient care and advanced in my field based on that principle alone.

I started seeing what would turn out to be numerous doctors about our inability to conceive. Eventually we ended up with a well known French doctor. We both had an exhaustive physical that cost the earth. We both had medical issues and were prescribed medications. I took daily Prednisone. I had many diagnostic and surgical procedures. I had fifteen vaginal ultrasounds. They were appalling. After the doctor would see an egg on ultrasound she would say " Go be nice to your husband." Eventually my labs indicated a possible pregnancy and an ultrasound found a beating yolk sac. To say I was thrilled after about twenty negative pregnancy tests is an understatement. I was more numb than anything else. I made them draw blood because I did not believe the urine dip. The French doctor saw something he did not like on an ultrasound and I had more surgery while pregnant to sew up my cervix. A few weeks after that I was hospitalized with kidney stones. Because I was pregnant I passed two stones with no pain medicine. I hit a doctor, with my fist, when he was palpating my abdomen in the emergency room. Pain, untreated, does breed violence. In me anyways.

 At some point in the summer I was sent to a High Risk OB/GYN doctor and he said I was his patient from then on and could not work anymore. I cried when I told my head nurse. I had home health nurses come to the house for a time.  I had to lay on my left side for seventeen days because I was very sick with HELP syndrome. It was formerly known as toxemia of pregnancy.  I had acute kidney failure, liver damage, hypertension, and was starting to have total organ failure. There was no choice but to deliver the baby to save my life. My platelet count was so low I was bleeding out of every injection site on my body. A C-Section was done and CC was born at 2 lbs 9 ounces. They had a full neonatal ICU team in the operating room. CC, at 32 weeks gestation, because she had been under such uterine stress was SGA (small for gestational age) and IGR (intrauterine growth retardation). She lost the 9 ounces and had to start over from two pounds. I spent the next twenty four hours in ICU and have no memory of it.

CC spent ten weeks in the NICU. I had worked in the NICU but when it is your baby in that isolette it is an entirely different matter. Stephen was wonderful with her and not scared of the tubes and IV's.

She came home weighing 4lbs 5ozs. She had to be holding her heat and feeding well. I was able to breastfeed her until she was one years old. She remained smaller than most kids her age and I always thanked God for giving me a baby for just a little longer.

CC is now a young adult, in college and and I would do it all again and more to have her. 

She is my advanced degree, in life.

 She is a joy for any and all who know her.

Keep praying for the miracle

"Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts, when God pries your fingers open."

                                                      ---Corrie Ten Boom 1892-1983

thank you for reading 

Olive