Crystal's rainbow baby Story
Largely due to terrible financial situations, my husband and I chose to wait several years before we tried for children. We finally felt it was time at the end of 2019. I was nearing 30 and we want a large family, so we needed to get started. After a few months of tracking cycles and actively trying, we got that beautiful positive! We were ecstatic, and Mother’s Day was coming up, so we used to occasion to announce to our families. Of course, this was a few months into the pandemic so everything was still unknown with dr. visits and where/how to deliver, plus the stress of keeping me and baby safe. I was allowed one support person to come for ultrasounds, so my husband came along for our dating scan at approx 7 weeks. They did the standard measurements and then called in an OBGYN to take a look. Being my first time, I didn’t know this was unusual. We saw a heartbeat and were feeling great! They said they had a hard time getting measurements but come back in two weeks for a rescan to get an official due date. Assuming everything was great, and seeing a heartbeat, we went ahead and started announcing our news.
My husband was out of vacation days at work, so we planned for me to go alone to the next appointment. The evening before, he had a feeling that he couldn’t really explain, but felt it was important for someone to come with me. His sister was available so she tagged along with plans to go shopping for baby clothes after.
That night, I had a horrible, horrible nightmare with a little boy who needed my help. In this dream, the boy ran into the woods and my husband started to follow, sensing danger. I told him we can’t save him, there’s nothing we can do. He continued running after the boy, but came out screaming and holding a lifeless body, sobbing with helplessness.
To say I had terrible anxiety after that dream is an understatement. But, Google reassured me that once you see a heartbeat the chances of miscarriage are drastically lowered. I went the appointment as scheduled with my sister-in-law, where the tech took measurements, went for my dr again, and I waited calmly. My dr came in with very few words. “I’m sorry, but there’s no heartbeat. You have three options for passing it, go home and think about it, and call me when you’re ready” Then I was informed that they found a massive basketball sized or larger cyst swallowing one of my ovaries. This required major surgery, which due to covid, took months to get scheduled.
By the end of 2020, I had my surgery and 6 weeks of recovery, and we were cleared to being trying again. We got pregnant with my rainbow baby immediately. I spent the entire 9 months terrified, begging my husband to miss more work because I had ptsd every time I had to walk into that office. Due to the massive cyst that pushed everything in my abdomen out of the way, I also couldn’t feel much fetal movement, which led to way too many scares. I had so much anxiety, I forced myself to not even think about planning or making any purchases until 20 weeks, because I was convinced it would hurt less if we lost our next child. But with lots of prayers, we delivered a beautiful, perfectly healthy baby girl 3 weeks early, in June of 2021. The love I feel for her every day is so much more intense after experiencing loss and still fighting for her through my grieving. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the ptsd and anxiety surrounding pregnancy now, but time has turned the wounds into scars. We didn’t know the gender of our first child, but I’m convinced my dream that night was not a coincidence. Our little Joseph never had to experience the pain of this world and is in heaven waiting for us.
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