Tips for Friends and Family when a Baby is Lost

This is a great list of tips for friends and family of someone who loses a baby during any stage of pregnancy or infancy. I copied this from Maddie's Footprints, a local organization committed to helping support families experiencing miscarriage, stillbirth or the loss of an infant:
http://www.maddiesfootprints.org/Tips-for-Family-and-Friends.php

Tips for Family and Friends

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How do you express your grief and concern without saying the wrong thing? How can you be there for the family? These questions are asked frequently by family and friends.  The loss of a baby can be a very “taboo” subject and it can be a difficult topic to talk about for all people involved.  Do not assume that the parents don’t want to talk about it.  By letting parents talk about their pain, you can help them come to grips with it. Here are a few suggestions:

What to Say

• “I’m so sorry. I know how much you wanted to have this baby."If you don’t know what to say – it’s better to say “I’m sorry” than nothing at all. 
• “It’s okay to cry.”
  Often when people are grieving, they try to appear strong to others.  If you see that they are becoming emotional, it may be helpful to know that their feelings are validated and you can allow them to express them without embarrassment.
• “Would you like to talk about it?”
  Usually, the parents want nothing more than to talk about their baby, so avoiding the topic can be viewed as being insensitive to the situation.
• “Is there anything I can do for you?”
  Often times in these situations, families will enjoy a home-cooked meal or help with other children or running errands.  Offer it to them and let them know you are available to assist. 
• “I don’t know what to say.”
  Honesty can be more comforting than words with less meaning.
•  Silence can be nice as well.  Just hold their hand or give them a hug. Let them know that you are there for them.

What Not to Say

Remember that while positive words can help at times, sometimes it may sound like you’re making light of the loss.  It may make the parents feel that they don’t have a right to be sad about their loss. Sometimes statements with good intentions may cause resentment.  Try to avoid the following:

•     “It was meant to be.”
•     “I know exactly how you feel.”
•     “Everything happens for a reason.”
•     “It’s good it happened now.”
•     “At least you didn’t get to know the baby.”
•     “Thank goodness you are young and you can have more children.”
•      “At least you have other children at home.”
•     “You have an angel in heaven.”

What You Can Do
You can be the greatest gift to grieving parents.  By allowing parents to talk about the pain, you can help them accept it. Your caring gestures can provide positive memories as parents look back on their loss.  Here are some other suggestions that may be helpful:

• Call the baby by name.  Never call a baby “it” or refer to him or her as a fetus.  To the parents, the infant was a baby, regardless of how long he or she lived.
• Let parents make their own decisions about the funeral and what to do with the baby’s room or clothing.  Don’t deprive them of experiencing the reality of death
• If there is a funeral, attending shows your care and supports. You are recognizing this baby was unique even though she or he didn’t live long.
•  If you can’t attend the funeral, send a letter or a note to the parents.  Express your support and concern.  These acknowledgments may be a treasured part of the baby book many parents choose to keep.
•  Give a special memento to the parents.
• Write a poem or a letter to the baby.
•  Remember parents on the infant’s special days – due date, birthday, and anniversary of the death. Acknowledge the baby at holidays. Remember that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day have special meaning for these parents.

Remember that grieving is a process.  Be patient and understand that the grief does not end at the funeral. It may take years for parents to feel “normal” again.  Some need less, some need more.  Parents go on with their lives, but they’re never quite the same again.  Providing support to these parents may allow them to cope easier.  You are very important to the parents now and in the months to come.

Falling

Sometimes as parents, we make mistakes. Maybe we forget to restock the diaper bag and have to come home from something fun early, or we say something that hurts our child's feelings. And other times, we accidentally hurt our children, which is what happened to us a little over a week ago.

We had a long day taking family to New Orleans to see the sights and eat some beignets. So after 4 hours in the car, and about 5 hours walking around in the intense heat of fall in Southern Louisiana, we were all pretty exhausted. We were settling down for the night, and I was preparing to nurse Naomi before bed.

I picked her up out of her crib and started walking toward the glider I usually nurse in, but somehow, along the way, I tripped and fell forward with Naomi in my left arm. Somehow on my way down she flew out of my arm. I don't have any recollection at all of how I landed, because I was watching her fall. It still plays through my head in slow motion.

She shot forward like a projectile, and the back of her head slammed into the second shelf from the bottom in a set of book shelves. Then the back of her head hit the corner of a milk crate holding my pumping supplies on the way to the floor. It looked like someone had thrown a plastic baby doll against the shelf, except that it was my precious 4-month-old daughter.

I screamed at my husband who was in the bed, "Oh, my God! HELP!"

And about half a second after the fall, Naomi started to scream and cry. I think I was laying across the ottoman of the glider when I scooped her off the floor and flipped her in one motion to look at the back of her head. There was no blood, but there was immediate swelling. two huge purple goose-eggs started to come out on the back of her head very quickly. And I started to panic and practically hyperventilate.

All at once, I handed the baby to my husband, started getting dressed, grabbed my phone and started to call the ER, all while crying and saying over and over again, "I don't know what to do. I am so scared!" I was completely out of breath while talking to the ER nurse and asking what to do, and my husband was getting his mother, who happened to be visiting at the time. I was actually a little surprised when the ER nurse told me to call the ambulance.

I never imagined I would ever have to call 911 for my infant. While I was panicked, I guess I thought I might be overreacting when I initially thought of calling 911. I mean ...she only cried for about 3 minutes before becoming calm and laid back like her normal self.

And after two EKGs, some oxygen, an ice pack and some other checks on the 15 minute ambulance ride, it seemed like the medics were not terribly alarmed, so I started relaxing. Then the doctor came in and said that she looked fine, but that he was going to do a CT scan of her brain to make sure she had no brain bleeds or skull fractures.

She came out just fine. She didn't enjoy laying on the back of her head for about 24 hours, but other than that, it didn't seem to bother her much. She has a lump in the back of her head that the pediatrician said will be there for a month or two, but other than that, she came out of it with no long-term effects.

Thank God for protecting my precious little girl!!

Once I knew she was ok, the guilt set in. I felt like a terrible mother. God had trusted me with this precious life, and my clumsiness could have changed or ended that life. I felt like I had let down my children, my husband, and God.

It took me a couple days to start moving around the house with her in my arms, and I am still nervous about carrying her. I also still cry when I remember her fall.

I was just starting to feel confident as a mother, and now I am struggling to feel like a stable mother.  I guess we all fail our kids and our spouses occasionally, and we have to ask God to restore our confidence and thank Him for protecting our loved ones from our mistakes and accidents.

Best. Baby. Ever!

Long time, no blog! I have missed sharing the most difficult and wonderful moments of my life with yall, and so I am back again.

My little Naomi is truly the best baby I have ever experienced.

Of course she woke up every 3-4 hours and wanted to eat non-stop for the first 6 weeks, because she is still a baby, after all.  But she started sleeping longer and longer at night, until, at 3 months, she started sleeping 8-10 hours at night about 90% of the time!

Initially, her feeding skills were challenged, to say the least. She fell asleep about 3 minutes into each meal, which resulted in poor weight gain and drama with her pediatrician. It also meant a 20 minute pumping session every couple of hours, ugh! Now, with some maturity (and a new pediatrician), we are still exclusively breastfeeding. And while her weight gain has been slow, her development is perfect, and she is alert, content, and super smiley!

She is also just plain pleasant. She smiles, laughs randomly, and loves to watch activity. She especially loves to watch her sister! Abigail is the best entertainment for Naomi, and Abi enjoys making her sister laugh and smile too.

I am delighted to be sharing my life with my husband and these two little girls!

And, Naomi is such a good baby, we're ready for another!

The Princess and the Pea

The Princess

The Pea

I can't possibly communicate how awesomely insane life is with these two ...but I'm going to try!

Abigail is two and one half year now, and while my original plan was to have her potty-trained by 18 months, our new goal is to keep her peeing IN the diaper instead of the bed. She only seems bothered by a wet diaper when she is in bed, at which time she removes her diaper and wets the bed. So we are now using super-tight, 24-mo-sized onesies  to prevent her from removing the diaper. However, since we only have three, and our laundry is a little behind ...imagine a 6-ft-high pile ...we have had to resort to taping the diaper on.

Abigail is really blossoming! She is talking non-stop, and her imagination is fascinating. She imagines castles and rivers where there are grocery stores and parking lots. She builds "big, Big, giant" boats and trains and houses from blocks. And she tells me the shspes, letters and colors of signs as we drive down the roads. Best of all, she loves her sister, and she tells me about it daily. 

Naomi is a pretty easy baby. She has been a very frequent nurser and has had a couple of medical challenges, but she is happy most of the time. What a joy! Her medical challenges do not scare me terribly. She has been a slow grower, and at 8 weeks is still not quite 9 lbs, but she's getting long and lean and is acting like a perfectly healthy 2-month-old! Because of her slow growth, I am having to pump and feed the extra to her by bottle after most feeds.

She has a mysterious lump on the side of her neck, for which she has had an ultrasound, lots of labs, and a day admitted to the pediatric ICU. All of the scary stuff has been ruled out, and the docs think it is muscular and resolvable.

And she has some type of allergy or sensitivity to something I am eating because her "output" isn't totally normal.

Our house is not doing nearly as well as our children! I mentioned the laundry. Our kitchen has dished piled around on the counters and is generally kind of hard to function in. I clean sections of it to cook, but it never seems done. The living room looks more like a toy box. And our bedroom is looking like a pumping room in a hospital - items of convenience near my nursing/pumping chair, baby laundry, a baby changing station, and a pack-n-play bassinet have all come to live in our room. Slowly, we will get back to the routine I had worked out before Naomi got here, but until, life is chaotic, to say the least.

The thing that has changed the most now that we have two is the amount of time I am focusing on children. Also, I have found that I am less worried about each child, and especially about the little things with Naomi. For example, the weird gurgles or odd chokes with Abigail sent us to the doctor almost twice weekly for the first month or two. With Naomi, we have only gone when they told us to come, or when a problem didn't resolve itself in a couple of weeks. I am significantly more confident in my mom-sense, and I trust my own judgement so much more! I actually feel like I know what I am doing with Naomi. Now, if I could just figure out how to do it all faster so I could clean my house!

Is this everything I thought it would be? Not even close!
It is SO much more.

More chaos for sure!
(I am wondering if I will ever recover to normal life again.)

And more passion than I could even fathom existed. I can love more passionately than I knew possible. And all in one day I can be passionately loving, protective, annoyed, afraid, and amused.

I wouldn't trade this for the world!

From 3 to 4

In my last post, I talked about the fears that I experienced during the first trimester of my 4th pregnancy. To continue...

Once we got past the 13th week, I felt a little more sure that this pregnancy would result in a baby rather than heartbreak. I was still very much hypersensitive about every cramp or pain or weird feeling. I had been to Labor and Delivery at least 3 times by the end of the second trimester.

By 33 weeks, I was becoming accustomed to feeling like the baby was going to fall out, and stopped worrying so much about it. So the day of my OB appointment at 33 weeks, I was not terribly concerned that I felt terrible.

That morning, I took Abigail to a play group at the park, and it was unbearably hot. We went from there to Chic-fil-A for lunch and to wait for my appointment. I must have looked terrible because the Chic-fil-A workers were asking if I needed to go to the hospital.

Turns out, those ladies at Chic-fil-A knew more than me....

Just a few hours later, my OB found that I was 1 cm dilated and 50% effaced. She sent me to the hospital for observation and determined that I was having regular contractions. So I got a series of shots: a set of steroids to boost the baby's lung maturity and a series of shots to stop the contractions. They told me I would likely only be pregnant for another week to 9 days.

Boy were they wrong! After lots of prayer and one week of bedrest, I stayed pregnant until 39 weeks.

I finally got to experience all of the parts of pregnancy I had always heard about but never experienced:

• Growing obscenely large
• Stretch marks
• Bring SUPER emotional (just ask my closest friends and husband)
• Wanting desperately to deliver because I was so uncomfortable

And then there was a new fear ...I was so afraid that the baby was going to be in danger in my womb. I cried a lot at 37 and 38 weeks because of that fear. It was a completely irrational fear because my OB and the high risk doc were monitoring the baby very closely.

Their only concern was that the baby was getting very large. At 33 weeks, the US tech told me that the baby was already about 5 lb, and the high risk doc said 6.5 lb at 35. They were predicting her weight to be around 9 lb if we managed to get to 39 weeks. 

At 37 weeks, I started having regular contractions about ever 10 minutes, and I thought for sure we would be having a baby within the day. Turns out the contractions weren't making any changes to my cervix, so I just kept having them with no change for about a week. Then at 38 weeks, they got closer together, to about every 5 minutes. Again, I thought I was going to have the baby within the day. But the change to my cervix was only very minor. 

I was 2 cm and 80% effaced and having regular contractions at my last appointment on Friday, April 27. Since the baby was expected to be large, we decided to induce the following Tuesday. I was excited, and SO ready after having contractions for 2 weeks.

On Tuesday morning we went into the hospital. I was already contracting regularly, but they gave me pitocin around 8:30AM to get the process jump started. My goal was to do it without pain medicine or an epidural. So I asked them not to break my water early on. However, since the pitocin wasn't doing much, I let the doctor break my water around noon. Things really got to moving at that point, and the pain started getting really harsh. I ended up demanding the epidural a couple of hours later because the pitocin contractions were too much to handle. The epidural started working about 10 minutes after they put it in, and I was much more comfortable. Then about 20 minutes later, around 2:45PM, the nurse checked me. I was already 8cm, so she started prepping the room. About the time she finished prepping the room, the pain changed, and the nurse checked me again. I was fully dilated and ready to go!

At 3:42PM, on May 1, Naomi Virginia Puckett joined our family. She was 7lb 5oz and 19.5 inches long. And our little family of 3 became 4. 

Pregnancy #4 - Trimester 1

In my last post, I talked about finding out that we were pregnant with Pregnancy #4 and the fear that comes with pregnancy after losses. To continue ...

After the misdiagnosed ectopic (tubal) pregnancy and resulting emergency surgery that came with Pregnancy #3, Gabriel, I was very cautious about finding a good OBGYN whom I could trust. I found a doctor that came highly recommended and whom I thought might be a good option. She was a young female doctor, which is something I generally prefer, and she was also a partner of the doctor who saw me through the recovery from the last pregnancy.

I transferred to her and tried to schedule an appointment for 8 weeks. Unfortunately, her schedule was full, and they couldn't get me in until 11 weeks!!! That really made me nervous since I had already had two first trimester losses. So I also scheduled with another doctor who has a good reputation in the area.

I had an ultrasound (US) at 6 weeks before the fertility specialist would release me. However, I was happy that the new doctor was able to schedule me for another ultrasound at 8 weeks. That ultrasound came back great, and my lab results did as well. However, the office experience was terrible! I waited for SOOOOO long, and I wasn't terribly excited about the doctor being a man.

I saw that doctor again at 10 weeks and had another ultrasound, again confirming that all was well. However, my office experience was again, very bad, so I decided to keep the appointment with the female OBGYN for the following week.

Again, at 11 weeks, I had another ultrasound, and again, everything looked great! I was overjoyed that I was approaching the end of the first trimester. However, I was still afraid of what could happen.

My doctor scheduled me to start seeing the high risk specialist to manage my thyroid medication, because I have hypothyroidism. Also, since the pregnancy with Abigail had been so complicated, I would be seeing the high risk doctor about every 2-4 weeks throughout the second trimester to make sure the baby was growing appropriately and my cervix was staying closed. Each of these visits would involve an US, and for that I was very grateful.

So the first trimester had gone very smoothly, but my anxiety level was pretty high. And that made it hard to get excited about the pregnancy. I was afraid of a second trimester loss or another long bed rest stay or something else complicating the pregnancy.

And I was ashamed that I was afraid. I was ashamed of my feelings because I was supposed to be a strong, Godly woman. I am  a wife to an amazing husband, a mother of one earthly princess and two babies in heaven, a business woman, a manager of my household and our recent move, and a woman called by God to minister to other women who deal with infertility and pregnancy loss ..... I was supposed to be filled with faith and courage. I was not supposed to be worried about whether God would keep my child safe in my womb. But I was. And to be honest, as I write this, 39 weeks pregnant, with an induction scheduled in two days, I still have fear about the successful birth of this child.

I just know that no matter what happens, God loves me, and he has a plan that is far beyond anything I can understand. I will be ok, and eventually, maybe God will help me overcome these fears and anxieties around pregnancy. I know for sure that he will use my struggles to help other women through their infertility, losses, and fears.

Fear That Comes from a Loss

In my last post, I talked about finding out that we were pregnant. To continue...

When most women find out they are pregnant, there is joy, excitement, and anticipation. But when you have lost a baby from a pregnancy that ends early, there is a tendency to have fear.

I was fearful.

Our first pregnancy ended with a miscarriage at 13 weeks. Our second pregnancy was filled with complications, and ended prematurely, at 33 weeks, with our little miracle, Abigail. Our third pregnancy ended in an emergency surgery because of a tubal pregnancy at 7 weeks. And all of them had started the same way that this one had, with a positive pregnancy test.

Statistically speaking, my fear was justified... But I felt like it was not very "Christian" of me to fear for the life of my child. God had it all under control, didn't He? He had it under control, and yet He still welcomed two of my children into His arms before I ever got to meet them.

The fear involved in early pregnancy, for me, includes things like:

• Not doing any heavy work
• No lifting, except for Abigail
• Getting as much rest as possible
• Taking prenatal vitamins religiously
• Checking the toilet paper with every wipe
• Being overly conscious of every little twinge or feeling of any kind anywhere in your body
• Calling the doctor almost daily with a new concern
• Etc .....

Because I had an ectopic/tubal pregnancy and a later-than-average miscarriage in my medical history, I knew that I would be monitored pretty closely during the 1st trimester. My fertility specialist had scheduled me for an ultrasound at 6 and 1/2 weeks to confirm that it was a viable pregnancy. However, I was so scared, and I called the nurses so many times, they bumped me back to 6 weeks, 0days. Fortunately, the baby measured 6 weeks exactly and had a very strong heartbeat. And I was so happy, but I was still fearful. 

While waiting for that 6 week ultrasound, I had called around to find a new OBGYN in the area and had scheduled a 1st trimester appointment for 8 and 1/2 weeks. So I knew I would get to see the baby again in just a couple more weeks, but I was still scared. I didn't have any morning sickness yet, and I was not feeling pregnant at all. I just wasn't ready to be joyful and confident that this child would make it to my arms.

Unfortunately, for those of us who have been through a pregnancy loss of any kind, the innocence of that first, joyful, positive pregnancy test is just kind of missing. The innocence goes away, and instead there is this fear of allowing yourself to be truly joyful until you know for sure that your baby will be ok. For some of us, that is when we reach the second trimester. For others, including me, that is when the baby reaches 24 weeks and has a good chance of survival if born prematurely. And for some, it is not until that precious baby is screaming in Mommy's arms. 

Don't get me wrong... I was happy to carry my Angel and Gabriel, even though I won't get to meet them until I get to heaven. And I still thank God for my two children in heaven and that they got to see Jesus face before anyone else, including Mommy and Daddy. I just really didn't know how much more heartbreak I could handle. But I had felt that way before. I thought I had reached my limit so many times before, and God's grace just carried me through all of the times I didn't think I could handle.

And so, the first several weeks of my fourth pregnancy were filled with fear, prayer, doubt, and memories of my other pregnancies. I just had to acknowledge that my God is more powerful than anything I could go through, and He has control. I had to keep reminding myself of that, and sometimes, fear still won out ...but I still reminded myself, over and over.