I have been long overdue to write this blog post, but a lot has been going on in our lives these days and so here I finally sit on a Friday night, sharing this next chapter in our story. As most of you know by now, our family is once again expecting a new baby and we are very excited!!! But let me start at the beginning.
Our sweet Hailey was born on September 5, 2016 and went home to be with the Lord on December 30 of that same year. I first took her to the hospital emergency room in October when she threw up a funny color, and for our first weeks and then month+ in the hospital, we were hopeful that she could get better. But by mid-to-late November, it seemed to be growing clearer that whatever Hailey had was very serious and although we didn't yet have a specific diagnosis, everything on the table at that point was terminal in one way or another.
So, one night, my husband and I sat in our room at the Ronald McDonald House and faced both the prospect of losing our daughter, and what this might mean longer term for our family. There are questions that pop into your head, and you feel ugly for even thinking them, and I think sometimes grieving parents lash out at each other if one should dare to give voice to them. It feels wrong to discuss having more kids when your second child is losing the battle for her life right before you. But when my husband raised the question, I didn't bite his head off. The thought had been in my head, too. Perhaps he was just the one brave enough to face it first.
My initial reaction was that our son would just become an only child --- my little partner in crime as we powered through moving around with the military and my husband's deployments. I specifically remember being adamant that if Hailey passed, we were selling the minivan we'd gotten immediately. I wanted that symbol or our burgeoning family gone, STAT.
My husband replied more calmly, and told me he thought trying again showed a certain amount of resiliency. I can tell you, that did NOT resonate with me! My exact thought is that people could go F*@K themselves with their resiliency --- I didn't care what anyone else thought. (Sorry for my language, but that was my very emotional reaction!).
My husband's second reason hit me far deeper. Having already lost his father, and facing the prospect of burying our daughter, my husband admitted that it made him nervous to have only our son. That if anything ever then happened to HIM, he wasn't sure he could survive that. To reach old age, and to have outlived all our children. To not have grandchildren to someday bounce on our knees and spoil. I realized that despite the agony of losing Hailey, I did still share my husband's vision of having multiple children. (But truthfully, even if I hadn't, I think I still would have tried again just for him. I regret every day that I never got the chance to meet his Dad, who is lauded by everyone who knew him as being the most wonderful man).
In the final days of Hailey's life, a genetic counselor came to meet with us. We discussed Hailey's suspected diagnosis (the formal confirmation of which we didn't receive back from the genetics lab until the day after we buried her). We discussed what it meant for our families (as it was the result of a bad gene inherited from each side) and what it meant for us, should we want to have more children.
We were presented with two options. (1) We could try to get pregnant the old fashioned way, and then conduct genetic testing (a) at 11-13 weeks via chorionic villus sampling (CVS) or (b) at 15 weeks via an amniocentesis. Either testing method would reveal whether or not the new baby had the terminal syndrome within 2-3 weeks of the procedure, at which point we could decide whether or not to continue with the pregnancy. I should mention, each procedure runs the risk of causing miscarriage.
(2) We could go the route of IVF, which I knew about on a very superficial level, but not much more than that. The genetic counselor warned us about what a stressful process undergoing IVF was, but told me that every family she'd known who had done it had not regretted it on the back end, when they finally became pregnant with what they knew was a healthy child (due to weeding out affected embryos before implantation). No genetic testing needed on the fetus, and no fear of causing miscarriage by doing so. But as I researched IVF, I was surprised at both the cost and the success rate for each round. A quick glance showed that one round of IVF cost roughly $12-$15,000 and my chances of conceiving were roughly 33%. And, knowing how expensive Hailey's medical bills were becoming, I was rather shocked health insurance wouldn't cover IVF as a means of potentially avoiding much more expensive payouts if we were to give birth to another child with her syndrome.
Complicating all of this even further, we knew my husband was set to deploy within about six months of us burying Hailey. We always wanted our children to be close in age - our son and Hailey had been 26 months apart. Plus, I'm getting older. So we didn't feel like we had long to wait before we tried again.
We buried Hailey in the first week of January. I'd already stopped taking the anti-anxiety medicine I'd needed to help get me through my final days with her. By January 20, I stopped taking the anti-depressants my doctor had also prescribed me a month before Hailey passed. I was scared to go off the medicine so soon after losing Hailey. I was scared about how much they might have been helping to prop me up...how consuming and raw my grief might be without them. But I knew the medicine needed to be out of my system before my husband and I tried to conceive again. We'd decided to try the old-fashioned route, since we hadn't had trouble getting pregnant before. That being said, we were blessed with our son immediately, but Hailey took five months of trying. I wasn't sure we even could conceive a third child before my husband deployed, and wanted to give us as much time as possible to try. So I pushed myself off the meds and I prayed to God, and to Hailey, a whole heck of a lot...
Through all of this and as I will mention in various parts of our journey, I SO feel Hailey's hand in all of this. I believe she is watching out for us, and I just strive to be worthy of her. To honor her, never forget her and love her always, with every fiber of my being. She was a blessing, and continues to bless us still, as I will share in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment