I Just Felt the Need to Share This...

Of course, I'd heard it before. I mean, just about everyone has seen the movie, right?

However, last night was the first time I'd ever read it myself. As I've said before, I'm a visual communicator, so for me reading something will always carry far more impact than simply hearing it.

As I read the brief, profound words, I was surprised by the tears that so suddenly flowed from my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. I was touched to my very core. Every word was singing to me, through my very veins, as though my heart was beating out the rhythm:


Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
--William Ernest Henley

This poem speaks to me, and it brought back some emotions that are still a little raw.

Most of you know that I have two beautiful kids, who I love with all my soul. What you may not know is that I have been pregnant 3 times. I hope you will all bear with me while I share the story with you.

From the first moment I saw that little pink plus sign on the pregnancy test, I felt that something wasn't quite right. I tried to feel happy and excited about it, but I just couldn't shake the overwhelming feeling that there was a serious problem.

I had spotty bleeding for weeks, and every time I brought it up to the doctor, I was always assured that it was perfectly normal for the first few weeks of a pregnancy. Then I went in for the first ultrasound. There was the baby, tiny and already growing arms and legs and miniscule little fingers. And there, in plain sight, was the baby's heartbeat--steady and strong.

The doctor calculated that I was about 8 weeks along, and set my due date for the middle of the next June. She also assured me that once a heartbeat was found in a fetus, my chances of miscarriage dropped dramatically. Things looked pretty good, and I tried to ease my mind.

A few days after the ultrasound was Halloween. Ty and I decided to announce the news to our parents. Everyone was so happy and excited, but I just felt sick.

We told our son the news before anyone else, and he was thrilled to be getting a new baby sibling. He was about 3 1/2 years old at the time. We took him to the appointments, and he heard the baby's heartbeat. He loved it.

Then, a mere week after that reassuring ultrasound, Ty, CT and I went out to dinner with my friend, Leesh. While at the restaurant, after showing Leesh the ultrasound pictures, we were just sitting there talking when I felt a sudden, small gush of fluid. I rushed to the bathroom, and was terrified to find that I was bleeding. That is one sight that will send just about any expecting mother into near hysterics. I could only feel cold. It was as though my blood had frozen in my veins.

I called the doctor, who told me to take it easy for a day or so and monitor the bleeding. If it got worse, I was to go to the emergency room. To my relief, the bleeding went away after the first 48 hours, and I went in to the doctor's office about 2 days later. She took another ultrasound, and the news was very comforting.

The baby still looked good, and its heartbeat was still strong.

About 4 days after that, however, we were at home, watching TV on the couch when I felt another small gush of fluid. Terror-stricken, I ran to the bathroom and saw that I was, again, bleeding. Then, as I sat on the toilet, there was an even larger gush of blood, and I immediately burst into tears of horror. I screamed for Ty, and he ran to me. I told him what had happened, and he called the doctor's office again. They told me to go to the emergency room.

We had to take CT with us, and he was amazingly brave. He sat quietly in a chair while the doctors and nurses at the hospital worked with me. He was scared, I could tell, but he didn't cry or panic. He was just very quiet.

Another ultrasound, a very in-depth ultrasound, was performed. The baby's heartbeat was still there, still looking good. However, after looking carefully at the images, the radiologist determined that the placenta had torn away from the uterine wall, very slightly. Otherwise, things looked relatively stable. I was told to rest until my regular doctor called me.

When I did hear from my doctor, she told me that there wasn't really anything that could be done. In the first trimester, if I was going to miscarry, it was going to happen, no matter what. She did, however, offer to give me weekly ultrasounds until we felt like things were okay.

For the next 3 weeks, the regular ultrasounds were very comforting. The baby looked great, the bleeding around the placenta had gone away, and the doctor said she felt like we could go back to regular 3 week intervals between visits.

Three weeks later, I went to my first normal visit. CT and Ty were both with me. The doctor measured me, and felt around, making sure everything was okay. Then she pulled out the little machine that detects the baby's heartbeat, allowing you to listen to it. She couldn't find a heartbeat. She checked in many different locations, but no heartbeat. She reassured us, "The baby could just be moving around too much to get a reading. Let's take an ultrasound."

We went back to the ultrasound room, and the doctor searched carefully. She found the baby, but something was very wrong. Where once there had been constant movement, all was now perfectly still. Where there had been a fluttering heartbeat, there was emptiness. I felt my own heart shatter when my doctor whispered hoarsely, "There's no heartbeat. I'm so sorry."

As my eyes overflowed with tears, Ty's low, quiet voice could be heard from the corner: "Is there a way you can find out when the baby's heart stopped?" The doctor nodded, measured the baby, and determined that the baby had died at around 12 weeks. Within a week of my last ultrasound.

I went in the very next evening for a D and C--which is where they dialate you and clean out the uterus, so the mother doesn't have to go through the cramping and bleeding when the body finally expels the fetus.
It was just supposed to be a 30 minute, outpatient procedure. Unfortunately, something was once again very wrong.

I remember waking up from the anesthesia with a pounding headache. I heard the nurse, sitting next to my bed, talking to someone on the phone about how I would have to stay in the hospital overnight because something had gone wrong during the surgery. It was later that I found out the whole story.

During the D and C, I had started bleeding. Bleeding is normal of course, but the normal amount of blood lost during this procedure is around 300 mL. I bled out approximately 1300-1500 mL. It was all they could do to get my blood pressure high enough to keep me alive.

Poor Ty. Two and a half hours after I'd been wheeled away from him and into surgery, the doctor came to him in the waiting room and pulled him into a smaller, private room. She was hesitant to begin, but she finally said: "Well, it's touch and go right now, but we think she's going to make it." She then told him what had happened, adding: "It's just a good thing that she chose the D & C, because if she'd chosen to expel the baby herself, she never would have survived the ambulance ride to the hospital."

After I'd woken up, they wheeled me into my room for the night. There was Ty, sitting against the far wall, his face as white as a sheet. I've never seen him so afraid before, or since. He walked up to me, carefully, and kissed me. He was being very quiet, very distant. I think he was still in shock. Ty said he needed to get home to CT and put him to bed.

It was the first night I'd ever spent away from my son, and I missed him terribly. Ty called me before putting CT to bed, and let me talk to him. I told him I loved him and that I'd see him the next day, doing everything in my power to keep him from hearing the tears in my voice. During my overnight stay in the hospital, I had to have 2 blood transfusions. Then I had to take regular doses of iron for several weeks afterward.

The next morning I took a shower, and as I was brushing my hair in the mirror, my doctor came in. She looked very surprised that I was up and about already, but she was happy to see that I was doing well. She filled me in on the rest of the surgery, and told me I could check out that day.

Ty brought CT with him when he came to pick me up. CT promptly climbed into the bed with me, and my entire body filled with warmth at the sight of him. I smiled as I held my beautiful son in my arms. Between him and Ty over the next few weeks, I found a way through those darkest days.

As painful as this was for our little family, it was also the catalyst behind a very important decision. It was because of this loss that Ty and I finally decided to take an enormous leap of faith and go back to college. If we hadn't lost that baby, we would never have taken such a bold and frightening step.

After such an experience, we both knew that it was now or never.

Of course, life has an amazing way of bringing joy out of pain. Within 5 months of the miscarriage, I was pregnant again with our angel daughter. Life moves onward.

But now you see why "Invictus" speaks to me so powerfully. Pain and sorrow are a part of life. It's what we choose to do with it that makes us who we truly are.