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Four months after we got married I
got pregnant. We were so excited. Two days later, I woke up
in agonizing pain and, like an idiot, I went to work anyhow
because I was only 3 weeks into a new job and had an important
meeting. By 1:30 pm I was having emergency surgery for a ruptured
ectopic pregnancy in which I lost one fallopian tube. We were
very upset, we really wanted kids right away.
It then took us 10 months to get pregnant
again. We were even more excited with the second pregnancy
because at 6 weeks they confirmed that it was “good
to go” and we started telling family. At 3 months, we
told the world. At 18 weeks we had our ultrasound and then
the news… the baby was small, too small. We had another
ultrasound at 20 weeks followed by a fetal cardiac echo at
21 weeks at Sick Kids in Toronto. We found out that our baby
girl, Amanda, had hyperplastic left heart syndrome –
she did not have a left ventricle or left atrium in her heart
and she had no pulmonary artery. There was nothing in her
heart’s plumbing that could even allow for surgery.
At 24 weeks + 3 days, we had to induce labour and I delivered
our baby girl stillborn. Amanda was old enough to be a registered
birth in Ontario, she was fully formed physically and we held
her and spoke to her before we had her buried at the same
site as her grandfather. At work I was a social pariah, people
didn’t know what to say or said the most insensitive
stupid things. Thank goodness for having the best husband
in the world.
It took us 9 months to get pregnant again
and I had a miscarriage at only 3 weeks. Talk about getting
discouraged, we had dreamed up 3 different ways of losing
a baby.
Then, finally, 4 agonizing months later,
we were pregnant again! My fourth pregnancy and I was very
nervous about telling anyone but everything worked out perfectly.
On November 1, 2006, our little Owen was born and he is perfect.
At 6 weeks old he got pyloric stynosis and had surgery at
Sick Kid’s hospital but we knew he’d be fine.
He is a perfect healthy 6 month old now.
We’d had so much grief having a baby,
despite no fertility issues, that we didn’t do much
planning around baby number 2… well, we think our run
of bad luck is over. I am due to have a second baby 6 days
before Owen’s first birthday! It took a lot of strength
from our families to get us through this and it has made our
marriage even stronger than it was. We wouldn’t trade
the 3 wonderful years of “just the 2 of us” where
we went on lots of great trips and had a lot of fun between
each devastating loss. We got through this and we can’t
wait to have our second perfect little baby!
Diane Slater
Oakville
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