A story about hope…Elizabeth Hope

May 17, 2010 at 6:00 am | Posted in More Than Beautiful Women, Posts by Sarah | Leave a comment
Tags: Baby Pictures, Baby Stories, Beautiful Stories, Beauty Tips, Grief, Grieving, Health and Beauty, Inner Beauty, Inspirational Stories, Miscarriage, Moms, More Than Beautiful, Mothers, Parenting, Stories, Story of Faith, Story of Hope, True Beauty

Sarah’s Thoughts…
Meet Amy.

Amy is a friend of mine from school, and thanks to blogging, I have gotten to know her better than I did when I saw her in person! She is married and has a beautiful girl and boy.

This story is about her journey with another precious child named Elizabeth; told in her own words.

Thank you so much Amy for sharing. You are truly an amazing woman!

The moment you find out you are pregnant your life changes and your emotions are all over the place. Your life will never be the same and it’s a moment that sticks in your head forever. When my husband and I found out we were expecting our second child we were shocked. Our daughter was only 8 months old and we had not planned on having another baby for a couple of years. I was very anxious about how I was going to take care of two kids only 15 months apart. However, it didn’t take long for my anxiety to give way to thoughts of decorating another nursery and doing more clothes shopping but more importantly holding and loving our newborn baby. I was excited for Peyton to become an older sister and our thoughts drifted to whether the baby was a boy or another little girl and what names we both liked. I was nervous about the possibility of having a miscarriage since the pregnancies were close together. But once I reached 12 weeks those fears subsided and I began to look forward to the end of the morning sickness and feeling the baby move for the first time. For me it seemed like it was going to be smooth sailing from here on out, it’s amazing how quickly things can change and your whole life can be turned upside down.

Around 15 weeks I went into my doctor for a routine checkup, everything looked great and the baby had a good strong heartbeat. I had some blood work done to test for chromosomal abnormalities and my doctor told me that if anything came up she would call me but if not she would just see me in a month. My appointment was on Monday July 28, 2008. It was a busy week for our family because my older sister was getting married. Wednesday July 30, 2008 was the day of the wedding and we had stayed the night at my parent’s house since we had to be up early for the wedding. I was running around the house trying to get myself ready when my phone rang, I saw that it was my doctors office and my heart dropped. I answered the phone and my doctor was on the other end telling me that the blood test had come back with the possibility that there were some chromosome problems with the baby. She told me that the test wasn’t 100% accurate and that I should not panic but that she wanted me to go see a perinatologist and get an in depth ultra sound to be sure. She scheduled the ultra sound for Friday and told me she would talk to me after she got the results back. I had already started crying half through the conversation and when I went to go tell my husband he told me to try and calm down and that until we were given something to be concerned about we should just go on as if everything was fine. I agreed with him but I could not get rid of the horrible feeling that I had.

Friday August 1, 2008 our lives changed forever. My husband and I had stayed up late the night before talking about what was going to happen the next day. In our minds we thought that we were going to go in there and either everything was going to be fine or they would tell us that we were going to have a baby with special needs. If we were going to have a special needs baby that was fine as long as the baby was healthy we would take whatever was thrown at us. We got up early and headed out to the brand new Intermountain Medical Center and met up with my mother in law so she could watch our daughter while we were getting the ultra sound done. We headed up and got checked in and waited for what felt like an eternity to get called back. Once we were finally in the ultra sound room the tech explained to us that this would be a regular ultra sound but she was going to be measuring every organ and limb. She got started and she was very quiet for a long time. To us everything on the screen looked pretty normal; finally my husband asked her if she saw anything that looked wrong. She took a deep breath and started naming off a list of things that she thought looked odd, but she said that the perinatologist would have to come in and talk to us about it. She printed of a huge roll of pictures and told us the doctor was going to look them over and she would be in with us in a few minutes. At this point we knew that something was wrong but we still weren’t sure what or how serious it was. The doctor came in started doing another ultra sound and began pointing things out and telling us what they meant. My husband sat next to me grasping my hand as every word that came out her mouth got worse and worse. She told us that our baby had a large pocket of fluid trapped behind her skull called a cystic hygroma, and that all of our babies organs were filled with fluid. She said that it looked as though our baby had something called Turner’s syndrome but unless they did an amniocentesis they couldn’t be sure. We told them to go ahead and do the amnio and once that was done she called in a genetic counselor who asked us a bunch of questions about our family history. Once the counselor was done the doctor looked at us and said that chances were that our baby was not going to make it to delivery.

It is hard to explain what I was feeling at that moment. You get pregnant and you imagine all the happy things that go along with it, you never imagine someone telling you that your baby is going to die. She explained that if our baby did in fact have Turner’s syndrome then it was a girl, Turner’s syndrome is where the baby has only one X chromosome. She said that of the babies born with Turner’s 1/3 make it to delivery and live relatively normal lives, 2/3 die before delivery with half of those not making it past 12 weeks. My husband and I were both crying at this point and we were trying to make sense of what was going on. I asked her if there was something that I could have done to prevent this from happening and if this was my fault, I felt like it was my job to keep this baby healthy and protected until she was born and somehow I had failed her. The doctor said that there was nothing we could have done and that this just happens sometimes. She then asked if we would like to just terminate the pregnancy that day. I remember being so shocked by her asking that question, the thought of ending the pregnancy was not even something that I could imagine. She said that there was really no reason to continue the pregnancy since the baby would probably die in the next week or so and that she could do the procedure right then. I have never felt so sick to my stomach than I did at that moment. My husband looked at her and said as long as this baby is willing to fight to live than we are going to let her. The doctor shook our hands said she was sorry and told us that she would call us with the results of the amnio in a few days. Soon after we left my regular doctor called me and said that she wanted me to come in every week and she would check for a heart beat. We called our families and explained to them the situation and we went home to try and process what they had told us.

About 5 days later the doctor called us and told us that the amnio confirmed that the baby did have Turner’s syndrome, so the baby was another little girl. When we found out that we were having a girl I told my husband that even if we do end up losing her I want her to have a name, I don’t want her to be known as just “the baby.” We both liked the name Elizabeth, and we decided that her middle name would be Hope, because that is what her short little life was all about now, hope that she would survive. A week after we had found all of this out I started to feel her move for the first time. I went into the doctor every week to have them listen to for a heartbeat and every week her heartbeat sounded good and strong. Originally the perinatologist told us to not be surprised if she did not survive another week, so each week that went by was a milestone.

September 2, 2008, I woke up and I just had a weird feeling, I was 21 almost 22 weeks. I got ready for the day and got my daughter dressed and ready and we headed out to my weekly doctors appointment. A year ago I had a doctor’s appointment and at the appointment I was told that the next day I was going to be induced to have our first little girl. Today was going to be different in a way. I went in and my doctor started to check for Elizabeth’s heartbeat, usually she could find it right away, not today. She kept looking for it and it only took me a few seconds to realize that she wasn’t going to find it. She brought in the ultra sound machine and looked for a heartbeat that way and she still couldn’t find it. Elizabeth was gone. My doctor looked up at me and told me how sorry she was and said that I needed to come into the hospital the next morning to be induced, same as last year, but so very different. I managed to make it out to the car and get Peyton in her car before losing it. I was so hopeful that Elizabeth was going to beat the odds; she was going to be different. We woke up in the morning and drove to the hospital, and got settled in a room in labor and delivery. Everything about that floor is filled with happiness and people bringing their babies into this world it seemed so wrong to be so sad. Going through labor is hard, but going through labor when you know that you are not going to get a happy ending, is not something that I would wish on anyone. Each contraction was like another punch to the heart. Elizabeth Hope was born on September 3, 2008 at 4:01 pm; she weighed 7 ounces and was 9 inches long. We were able to hold her for a couple of hours and our families were there and got to see her. The next couple of days we spent with family, celebrating our daughter’s first birthday and on Monday September 8, 2008 Elizabeth was buried up in Smithfield City Cemetery.

I know that she is in a better place, and I know that I will see her someday but it doesn’t take away all the pain that I feel from losing her. I wonder what she would have looked like and what her little personality would have been. I think about her everyday. While I wish that the outcome would have been different I know that I am a stronger person for having gone through it, and I am much more appreciative of the smaller things in life. Elizabeth has forever changed our lives in the short time that we were blessed to have her.