I’m awake because it only seems right to spend as many precious moments as I possibly can thinking of you and praying for you and giving thanks for you and willing with all my might to feel you kick. How many moments will we have together, my sweet baby? Not enough. Not nearly enough. But oh I will love you forever. With all of me, I will fiercely love you forever.
This past Wednesday, we received the worst news we could imagine. No, this news we couldn’t imagine.
We went in for our gender scan. We had big plans - gender reveal with close friends that night, new carpet for the nursery this summer, photographs of your birth this fall, camping next spring, how old you’d be when E turns 16. I imagine you turning 8, with your big sis both proudly and reluctantly driving you places. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined you 8 years old.
Hydrops. The unfamiliar word comes across the ultrasound screen. At this point, we already know something is wrong. Conversation with the sonographer went from how we want to find out boy or girl, to silence, to a groan, to “I’m sorry. I don’t like what I’m seeing. I’m going to get the doctor to come in.” Then more silence. It was all I could do not to jump off the bed and run to get the doctor myself. We waited for what seemed like hours, probably only seconds or minutes.
The doctor, our favorite doctor, the one who has successfully seen us through infertility and complications before, gives me a hug immediately when he walks in. “I’m so sorry,” he says. A few explanations and we’re now waiting in his office. We’ll head to high risk as soon as they have an appointment for us. We’re ushered out the side door, my tears freely flowing, so we don’t have to walk through the lobby of big belly pregnant women, our faces already red with grief.
We text friends and family to pray. And we wait. For two hours, we drive around Chattanooga, unsure of what to do with ourselves. We make small talk about gorgeous houses and we stop at CVS for tissues. I start to look up the word I saw on the screen. Hydrops fetalis, I learn. I digest little bits of the information on my phone screen. Our doctor has already broken the news to us; we know it’s bad. We know it’s only a matter of weeks or months that we’ll know this sweet baby, and only on the inside. But we’re still tentative in our texts. Still clinging to hope or disbelief or both.
The high risk appointment goes by both like a whirlwind and a slow motion nightmare. We meet each nurse, doctor, geneticist with a somber greeting. “I’m so sorry we’re meeting under these circumstances,” they say. And their compassionate half-smiles and sorrowful eyes make me believe them.
The ultrasound confirms hydrops fetalis, along with other fetal abnormalities. The doctor kindly confirms that, due to the severity of the complications, our sweet baby is unlikely to survive the next few weeks and months of pregnancy.
Words will surely fail us over the coming weeks and months. I don’t know how often I’ll write, how often I’ll cry, how often I’ll smile, how often I’ll answer questions about when I’m due. But I do know that I love this sweet baby with every fiber of my being. That I don’t want her forgotten. Oh how desperately I don’t want her forgotten. That the moments I’ll carry her dying body within me will likely be the only I’ll get with her on this side of heaven.
And that my Heavenly Father has not missed a tear I’ve shed, that He’s not forgotten or overlooked a moment of my grief, that He’s held us and loved us and carried us these last four days. And that He loves this sweet baby even more than I do.
Sweet, sweet baby. You are perfect. You are so, so perfect.
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.” Psalm 139:13
“My heart throbs; my strength fails me, and the light of my eyes - it has also gone from me.” Psalm 38:10