My phone pinged with texts the whole time I was driving. Eric wanted to know where I was. My sister wanted to make sure we were safe. And then I saw a text from one of my sweet friends. She is 11 weeks pregnant and has been cramping all day. She sent a text to our little group of prayer warriors to pray over her and her baby. She has had several miscarriages and a high-risk pregnancy, so she is obviously and understandably quite shaken. I was immediately taken back to my own scare on Good Friday in 2006 …
“A
couple of weeks after I found out I was pregnant I had a business trip to
Cincinnati scheduled for a regional sales meeting. It was the first time I had traveled since my
IVF. I couldn’t give myself the Intramuscular shots and had
needed Eric to administer them to me each night. By this time they had switched the
progesterone I was getting nightly from a shot to a suppository. I was excited to get to see some of my dear
friends from work. Eric left town as
well to go audit a company in Dallas, Texas.
The
industry I worked in was very male dominated. There were 23 of us in my sales
region, and I was the only female. I was
blessed to work with a great group of guys.
I only confided in a couple of the guys, Mark and Andy, with whom I had
a close friendship, that I was pregnant.
They were so excited for Eric and me to have the family we so desperately wanted to have.
One
night the entire team went to dinner at a restaurant across from our
hotel. During dinner I felt some odd
cramps that lasted a few minutes then went away. Immediately it was like all the conversation
in the background was 100 miles away. I
sat in my seat frozen and thought, “No. No. No. No!!!!!!!!!!!!” It happened again. It took everything in me to not burst into tears
and run away. I calmly excused myself
and rushed to the ladies room. As soon
as I sat down, blood gushed
from my body. When I looked down I saw a
pool of blood and a big clot in the middle.
“NO!!!!!!!!!!” I stared at the
clot and thought, “No God. Please
don’t let
that be my baby!”
I
quickly pulled myself together. I sailed
by the table and told everyone I was feeling under the weather and rushed back
to my hotel room. I felt another cramp
and ran straight to the bathroom. Again
blood gushed from my body and another clot came out. I panicked and called Eric. I was absolutely hysterical. We couldn’t lose our
baby after all this! It took a few
minutes for him to even be able to understand what I was saying through all the
tears and hiccups. He calmed me down and
reminded me that my friend, Christy, had experienced bleeding in her pregnancy
and that I should call her.
Christy
was such a blessing to me. She was also
a nurse and she was able to calm me down and get me to think rationally. She had me lie down and take deep breaths. She then encouraged me to call my doctor’s after-hours number.
One of
the on-call doctors called me back immediately.
He was so calm and caring with me and I was so grateful. He had my chart and was able to look at my
beta numbers. The doctor told me they
couldn’t really
be sure what happened until I had an ultrasound. He thought that because my beta numbers were
so high that if I had indeed had a miscarriage, maybe it was one of the
twins. I got an appointment for ten
o’clock the next morning for an ultrasound.
That
night was the longest of my life. Eric
frantically tried to get on the earliest flight back to Nashville. I quickly gathered all my things and drove
from Cincinnati to my parents’ house in
Louisville, Kentucky. I barely remember
the two-hour drive. God again watched
over me as I drove through my tears. I
cried on the phone to Eric and my friend, Kristen. The only prayer I could even get out was,
“Please, Lord, please.”
When I
finally got to my parents’ house, my parents were waiting for me. I will never forget the tears and hugs that
met me. I looked at their faces and saw
broken hearts too. Their hearts broke
for their baby and the grandbaby they were so excited to finally have.

The next
morning my parents drove me the rest of the way to Nashville as I laid down in
the passenger seat. My mom and I talked
on the way. She said, “Stephanie, you
know that God is in control but that doesn’t mean
that the Devil doesn’t
intervene to try to hurt you.” I pondered that a minute and then said, “Well
then the joke is on him because I have prayed more than ever and turned to God
during this time!”
Eric got
on an early flight. I got to Nashville
Fertility Center (NFC) before Eric. I
was already back in the ultrasound room before he got there. He came back a few minutes before I had my
ultrasound. We clung to each other and
cried all the tears that we missed the night before. We gripped each other’s hands and prayed with all our might for God’s protection over our baby.
Dr.
Whitworth came in and did our ultrasound herself. I laid back with tears streaming down the
sides of my face as I gripped Eric’s
hand. I prayed Psalm 147:13 in my head
over and over as she moved the wand to try to find a baby.
And then
she did. She found a baby with a heartbeat! Then she found another baby with a heartbeat! And then she found a sub chorionic hemorrhage
(SCH) that was right next to my cervix.
It was also right next to one of the babies and was twice the size of
it!
I
dressed and we met with Dr. Whitworth to discuss the ultrasound. We were so excited. We had not only one, but two babies with
heartbeats! They were alive!! However, we were anxious to hear about the
SCH. It looked like a huge blob that was
ready to gobble up my babies and I was scared.
Dr.
Whitworth told me that I had to take it easy and let it heal. It could take a couple of weeks or
months. With time, hopefully the clot
would heal and be absorbed into my uterus.
I would go home on bed rest and come back the following week for another
ultrasound. She also switched me back to
taking progesterone via an IM shot until the end of my first trimester.
Another
long week of bed rest and lots of prayers.
I took my doctor’s orders
very seriously. I stayed in bed except
to shower, potty, and throw up. Yes, my
morning sickness finally reared its ugly head!
I still cramped and
spotted some, but it gradually lessened.
When I
went back for my follow up ultrasound, we saw that the babies had grown to
twice their size! The SCH was still
there, but it was getting smaller. It
was still way too close to Twin A. I
went home and did the same thing again, hopeful for better news the next
week. By the end of two weeks the SCH
had been completely absorbed by my uterus!
We were
so grateful. Finally I felt like I could
enjoy being pregnant. I also let myself really think about and
revel in the fact that we were going to have twins! I had been
hesitant to think about it too much before because I was so scared that we were
going to lose one of them. People ask me
all the time what I thought when I found out that we were having twins. I felt nothing but absolute, pure joy."
Please take a moment to say a prayer for my friend to calm her anxious heart and for her baby to be healthy.
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