Author: Surviving The Storms

When we found out that our daughter had passed away there were so many questions racing through our heads. We were wondering how this could happen and why it would happen. She was due in just a few days. How could she pass away so suddenly after such a healthy pregnancy? My doctor called my pregnancy a “text book” pregnancy. The morning sickness in the first trimester was horrible, then just heartburn, and pregnancy induced carpel tunnel. Besides that I felt great. I remember thinking how great I felt and I couldn’t believe how active I still was even during the last few weeks of pregnancy. I was even joking with my doctor about great I felt at my last appointment on that Monday before we lost Berkley.

We were hoping that we would get some answers why our daughter passed away once she was born. After being thrown into this reality we have learned so much. Stillbirths still happen and some women never get an answer why their child passed away. Right after Berkley was born our doctor could see what happened.

Berkley had a velamentous cord insertion. That is where her umbilical cord inserted on the edge of the placental plate instead of in the center. So it was connected to a weaker spot and the connection ruptured. This is just a random occurrence. Nothing genetic or anything that could have been prevented while she was developing. The frustrating part about this diagnosis is that it is something that they look for at the 20 week anatomy scan. Berkley’s scan came back normal. Umbilical cord insertion was marked as normal. When it wasn’t. If it would have been seen she would have been monitored more. We will never know what the out come would have been if it was seen.

In the beginning this pissed me off more than you could imagine. I couldn’t get over the “What if” and “how did this get missed”. I started researching the diagnosis and the more information I found the more angry I would get. It is something that has a very high survival rate if it is caught and it is highly detectable on an ultrasound. The anger and what if game was consuming me.

I had to let those thoughts go. The answers that I found were not the ones that I wanted. That wasn’t my situation and we can’t bring our daughter back. What happened just happened and it is what it is. We cannot change things that have already happened and we just have to learn to live with the loss of our daughter. Her life was short and it is hard to come to terms with that fact. I am so grateful though, we were able to have our daughter for those 9 months. We grew to love her and will love her until the day we die. Knowing that love is one of the greatest gifts in this life and I will not let her death over shadow the beauty of her life.

We have to make a choice every morning. I knew that I didn’t want my daughter’s life to be the reason why I would lose control. I knew that I had to change.

I slowly went back to work. I started going out into the public again. Going to places that I go on a regular basis. I am fortunate that my family/coworkers told a lot of the people that we see on a regular basis that I lost my daughter, so I didn’t have to explain. When I started going to the places we would go to for lunch in the small town. Several women’s eyes would fill with tears when the first saw me, they would hug me and tell me they were sorry for my loss. I started to go grocery shopping by myself. These are fast trips and are still very hard for me to do.

My anxiety was out of control and I was carrying around baby weight without a baby. I decided I needed to start going to the gym again. I would sometimes cry all the way to the gym because I was having a bad day but, I made myself go. I am going 4 or 5 days a week to try to calm my mind and get back into shape.

My relationship with my husband is the most important thing to me also. I am so grateful that he is such an amazing person. I knew he was in extreme pain also but, he still would get up every day go to work and make sure I was ok. We knew we had to communicate our emotions with each other and try to understand each other’s grieving process. He would hold me when I was crying uncontrollably and he wasn’t afraid to cry in front of me either. Seeing my husband cry, made me love him even more. Losing our daughter has made our love even stronger.

We started going to counseling together. We wanted to make sure that we were moving forward in our grieving process. I am reading books, talking to other bereaved mothers in online groups, reading articles and blogs from other mothers. Talking to other mothers that know exactly what it feels likes helps me a lot and so does reading their blogs.

In a world full of people that haven’t experienced this pain there is a club of parents that didn’t chose this life but, are living it. Their words give me strength. They understand the intense emotions, the strange triggers, the healing process and that we will not get over this tragedy. We learn to live with the pain and hope the intensity goes down with time.

We made choice. We make a choice every day. Our daughter’s death will not destroy us. We will live for her. I can feel the change within me already. I am still a very broken person but, I am a stronger person. I am braver and I don’t care what others think about me as much. I hope we continue to grow for the better.

I do not believe in Karma. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason. We just live in a broken world. Full of tragedy, things that don’t make sense and things we cannot control. We just have a choice to make about how we respond to the tragedies in the world. We chose to fight, love, and grow from the pain we are experiencing.

As the initial shock wore off with time I began to lose my mind. I couldn’t function like I used to, I was so lost, broken, and didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t understand how we were supposed to go on living a normal life again. After spending the last year planning for a baby, finding out we were going to be parents, and then falling in love with our daughter. She was gone and it was just us again.

We didn’t want to be around anyone or talk to people. There were only a couple people that we would talk to besides our parents. We were in hiding. Tony took a week off of work and I took five weeks off. I was still showering, cleaning, and cooking. So I considered that a win. The rest of the time I was crying, searching for answers, reading, or coloring in a color book. I couldn’t do anything else.

I had to learning how to exist in a world full of reminders of our reality. There were so many triggers that would send us off the deep end. Watching TV, seeing commercials or babies would send me into an uncontrollable crying spell. I had to go to the stores where I would run into a pregnant women, baby or even worse a new born. I would hear a baby crying and my whole body would tense up, pain in my chest would start and I had to do everything in my power to try not to start crying.

I was losing my mind. I felt like a little child and was so broken. I was so angry at world. I had crazy anxiety. Why would this happen to us? Then I thought. Maybe I deserved this pain. We couldn’t do anything anymore. Even going to see our friends felt so pointless. I didn’t care about anything anymore. All I wanted was my husband and my daughter. I didn’t care about anything else.

I started forming some pretty unhealthy habits. I was so afraid to not be able to sleep and  the nightmare would replay in my mind every night. I was drinking Nyquil every night for the first couple months. I was eating horrible. I didn’t even eat junk food like that when I was pregnant. I started drinking every night. I just wanted a break from the pain. I couldn’t take feeling the intense pain that physically hurt me. I remember driving home sometimes not caring If I made it there. I was in such a dark place. Living in the depths of despair. I couldn’t even imagine the pain before I had experienced it myself.

I could see the look on my husband’s face when he looked at me. He was scared. He thought he was never going to see the women he used to love again. My parents told me they were worried too. I was not trying to act this way. I knew it wasn’t healthy. I knew when I drank so much that I was sick twice within two weeks that I was walking a fine line. Addiction runs in both sides of my family so I know it is something I shouldn’t mess with.

I knew I had to pull it together. Losing our daughter was the last thing I could ever imagine happen to us. It destroyed us but we had a choice. To fight for our lives or live in the darkness. We decided to fight.

Sunday morning we were allowed to leave the hospital. We had to walk out those same emergency room doors that we came in that early Friday morning. Only this time, we didn’t have our daughter with us. The nurse Rachel walked us to our vehicles. She gave me a huge hug and tears ran down both of our cheeks. Tony insisted that I rode home with his mom and not in my car. We had the car seat set up in my car for a few weeks before we lost her. That drive home was so surreal. I remember just looking out the window and seeing the world moving so fast and everyone was just living another day.

We decided to stay at Tony’s parents house for a couple days. We didn’t want to come home to see her clothes hanging up and her crib, empty. Azure had packed up most of Berkley’s things that were in every room of the house. We asked her to leave the stuff in her room so we could pack that way when we felt ready.

When we got to Tony’s parents house I went downstairs to the guest room. That was the first time I had been alone since I heard that our daughter had died. As soon as I was at the bottom of the stairs I started crying, gasping for air, and my legs gave out as I was trying to walk to the end of the hallway. My whole chest was tight and felt like my heart tore in two. I was still in shock. I could feel the pain of losing her, immense pain, but still a little numb.

The pain would come in waves. It was almost like my body would only let me feel so much physical pain and then my body/mind would just turn on auto pilot. I remember for the first couple weeks feeling like an out of body experience when I wasn’t breaking down. I was just there. We still had things we had to do.

We had to go the funeral home and make arrangements for our daughter. We went there with both of our moms. We decided to have her cremated and keep her close to us. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that our daughter was cremated on her due date. We didn’t have a service for her. We didn’t think we could handle it. Having to be around people while we were so broken would have been torture.

We finally went home after a couple days. Seeing all her stuff waiting for her arrival was heartbreaking. It’s hard to explain but, I also didn’t want it to put away either. We loved her so much. They were her things and It was all that we had left of her.