Tag: loss

God’s Peace

There’s something to be said for truly and fully giving your grief over a loss to God.

Last week, we held our annual women’s retreat in Ruidoso, NM. One of the breakout sessions I attended was on the subject of releasing your grief to God over a loss suffered directly or indirectly due to death, sickness, accident, divorce, etc. The part of the class I was most interested was the symbolic balloon release that happened after the class. All the participants were given a balloon and the opportunity to “name their grief” on the balloon. After the balloons were ready, everyone went outside where the class leader said a few words, prayed and then allowed people to release their balloon “only when they were ready to let it all go.”

As many of you already know from earlier blogs, my husband and I lost a baby due to miscarriage earlier this year. Earlier this week, Oct. 30, was the original approximate date given for our baby to be born. I’ll be honest and tell you that I was not looking forward to this date AT ALL!! I compared it to how I felt on Mother’s Day this past year. I was really looking forward to Mother’s Day until I had the miscarriage. It was a pretty rough week leading up to the day, but I did survive it with the help of my husband, family and friends. For Oct. 30, I was expecting myself to be a blithering mess, not able to work for all the tears and sniffles and just not fun to be around for anyone.

But, that was not the case. The day came and went pretty uneventful. I told my husband that evening that I believed it had a lot to do with the balloon release the previous week. I said above that the balloon release was during our “women’s” retreat, but my husband is one of the few men in our church that attend to help us out with heaving lifting, hanging decorations and security during our weekend event. Since I knew he would be there and the loss was shared by both of us, I asked him to do the balloon release with me; something we could do together.

As with others there, we cried, we hugged and held on tight to each other. Letting go of the loss of a child we never met, never got to see, with the exception of the few weeks we saw the baby on the ultrasound monitor, but a baby we loved so much and were ready for the changes the little bundle of joy would bring to our family life was a freeing experience. We both held on to the balloon and when we were both ready to “let go”, we let the balloon named “baby boy Hyden” float into the air…up, up and away into the clouds.

I never expected that experience to be as freeing as it was. And it didn’t really feel “freeing” at the time. But as the retreat ended and I’ve gotten back into the normal busyness of life, this week has also come and gone. I thought of my baby often this week and especially on Wednesday, but never to the point of utter and uncontrollable sadness. I still cry and still get sad, but God has taken my grief and replaced it with His peace. The kind of peace only He provides.

“Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything you can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” ~Philippians 4:7 (NLT)

Curveballs of Life

In baseball terms, a curveball is a type of pitch thrown with a characteristic grip and hand movement that imparts forward spin to the ball causing it to dive in a downward path as it approaches the plate. There’s also an expression “to throw a curveball” essentially meaning a significant deviation to a preceding concept.

I use the term as to say “a slight or quick shift in the normal happenings of life” or another, easier way to say it, I guess, would be “to have the rug pulled out from underneath you.” Anyway you say it, you’re basically meaning that life has shifted unexpectedly and left you with many unanswered questions. If we’re left in this state too long, forgiveness and bitterness begin to creep into our existence making it harder, and many times, more impossible, to move on from this point in our lives.

I, though, am choosing to look to God through the recent circumstance that has “thrown a curveball” into the normal, steady life of me and my husband.

As a young girl, I had the same dreams as many other young girls: grow up, get married to a very handsome man and have lots of children and live happily ever after! For the past ten years, I have been happily married to a very handsome man. And I’ve been patiently (well, trying to be) waiting to be a Mom.

I’ve had many, many friends have their babies and begin to raise their families. I’ve hosted countless baby showers for those friends, all the while wondering, “when will it be MY turn!?!” I’ve prayed, I’ve fasted and every time, the same request: “Please God, when it’s our turn, I pray that we get pregnant right away, the first time so that we can start our family with our healthy and beautiful triplet boys.” Same prayer, all the time, never changing.

Lately, I had been noticing a few different and unusual things going on in my body, so I decided I’d take a home pregnancy test to see if my assumptions were correct. I was working from home one day, so I decided it would be a good day to try a pregnancy test since I had the whole day to test my theory, with no one around, just in case I was wrong. Well, two (yep, had to double-check my initial findings) pregnancy tests later and I was ecstatic with overwhelming joy & no one to tell (the downside of being home alone)!

I started by praising God for giving me this miracle that I had dreamed of for so long. I called the doctor’s office to schedule an appointment for the official test (this was my first time and I wanted to be 100% sure). Then, I plotted on the correct time and method to tell my husband. Should I wait for doctor confirmation, just in case? Or should I tell him when he gets home from work?

Well, it’s hard for me to keep really exciting secrets like this, so I had to tell him…it was just too much to hold in. It was bad enough I was going to my workout class the next morning and wasn’t telling my friends; I at least had to go ahead and tell my husband. Needless to say, he was as overwhelmed and excited as me…a dream come true that we had always wanted!

The next day I went to the doctor, received the confirmation I needed and was then given booklets upon pamphlets of useful pregnancy knowledge I wasn’t currently aware of. I called my husband on the phone after the appointment to give him the good news and found myself speechless and crying; so much joy, I couldn’t even process it all. We called our families the next day, crying as we told them. Then, we told all of our friends at church the day after that.

There were screams of excitement, screeches of joy and tears of happiness at our news. Our friends were just as excited as we were to start this new adventure; chatterings of baby showers and decorations and themes began to circle around. Everyone was excited and everyone was ready to see us through our journey.

Our first ultrasound appointment was scheduled for two weeks from my initial visit to the doctor’s office. I was told at that initial appointment that I was 5weeks and 2 days already. By the time my appointment would roll around, I would be one day shy of 8 weeks. My husband and I were so excited because we were going to hear our baby’s heartbeat for the very first time!

I signed up for every baby website I could find. I tracked the status of our baby’s size week by week. I believe at 7 weeks, he (faith speaking) was the size of a blueberry. We had a lot of fun with the weekly updates, learning the size of our baby from week-to-week, seeing what was developing each week. We were fully enjoying all the aspects of being pregnant. I was certainly feeling all the aspects of being pregnant; nausea (no morning sickness, though, yea!), extreme tiredness and always hungry.

The day of our first ultrasound appointment had finally arrived. We saw the baby on the screen; we could actually make out the head, arms and legs…it was really small, but really cool. We were disappointed, though, when the ultrasound tech couldn’t locate a heartbeat. She measured the baby to be smaller than initially claimed, so instead of being almost 8 weeks, I was closer to 7 weeks and 1 day. The doctor decided to give it another week and we set another ultrasound appointment for the following week.

We were pretty disappointed about the heartbeat at first. Many of my friends told me that it was common not to hear the heartbeat at 7 weeks. Even though the heart starts beating at 6 weeks, it was still a common thing to not hear it until much later; more like between 8-10 weeks. We were relieved to hear that! The rest of the week went by very uneventful.

We went to our next ultrasound appointment the following week, excited to finally hear the baby’s heartbeat. We went through the same process as the previous week, with the same result…still no audible heartbeat. This time, we were armed with information that it could still be too early to hear the heartbeat, so we were unfazed. Until we met with the doctor after the ultrasound and she told us the baby hadn’t grown at all in the week since our last appointment. I was still measuring at exactly 7 weeks and 1 day.

I’m not sure of my husband’s thought process at that exact moment, but my mind was still searching for possibilities and reasons everything was still okay and that this was normal. The doctor was trying to be reassuring, but she had the sad, puppy-dog face going so it was hard to find the normalcy and the “everything is still going to be okay” attitude that I was trying so hard to maintain. She told us she wanted me to get two blood tests done, to check my hormone levels, which in her opinion, were dropping. The blood tests, in her not-so-subtle terms, were a final determination that we had experienced a miscarriage and our baby was gone.

We left the doctor’s office and went on what seemed at the time, a scavenger hunt of labs in the area for my blood tests. After locating a lab office after our 5th location try, I had my blood drawn. According to the medical form I had to take with me to the lab, the results were requested as “STAT!”; seriously, it was written in all caps, exclamation point and circled about 6 times…they were serious about getting the results fast! I was told to go back to the same lab again, two days later, for the same blood test with the same request of “STAT!”

We went back to the doctor’s office after the first blood test to retrieve my husband’s truck so we could each go back to work. As we sat in my car, the heaviness of what we’d been told finally took effect on us and we can began to sob in each others’ arms. How could the one thing we had waited on, for so long, be slowly ripping away from us at such a quick pace?

We sat there for a while, just holding each other, crying and wondering how the tables had turned so quickly. Seriously, where did that stinkin’ curveball come from? Many of our friends knew our appointment was that day, so I was beginning to get texts from them asking how it went. My husband and I parted ways and went back to work; but only after I assured him I was going to be okay. Well, I guess I was wrong…those feelings were way more than I could handle. I cried all the way back to work and I cried in the parking lot of my work. I ignored every text I got from friends and family. And when the texts went unanswered and my friends began calling, I ignored those as well. I hadn’t even come to grips with what the doctor told us and there was no way I could verbalize, much less, text to someone and tell them.

While I was back at work, trying to keep to myself and finish the day, I finally emailed my Mom. I gave her a brief synopsis of what the doctor told us and told her I just couldn’t talk right now. She responded by saying she was “so very sorry” and to call when I could. One of my co-workers stopped by my desk to ask about the appointment. When I told her it was “fine” and never turned my head, she knew something was wrong. The only words it took after that were, “Are you sure?” and I turned my head to her and simply said, “No.” My tears were uncontrollable after that and she just hugged me like a Mom would and let me cry it out. She didn’t ask for details, she just let me cry it out and then left me alone. After that, I left work early and went home. I couldn’t even make it out of my car in the driveway without crying uncontrollably for what seemed like an eternity. I finally found enough courage to text a couple of my closest friends to tell them what I’d told my Mom and then I went to bed and cried some more.

Friends had dinner delivered to us later that evening, but we still kept mostly to ourselves. I did manage to go to work the next day, but it was a nice relief because my co-worker had informed the rest that things were not good and not to disturb me with appointment questions. We did experience a glimmer of hope later in the week after the second blood test. Two days after my initial blood test, I went back for the second test. My doctor’s office called later that morning to say that my hormone levels were going up, instead of down, which turned out to be a good thing. There was still hope and they set another ultrasound appointment for the first part of the following week. If the baby showed signs of growth, there were positive possibilities that we could continue with my pregnancy. But, if the baby didn’t grow still, we were pretty much done.

It’s amazing what the smallest glimmer of hope can give you; it definitely renewed my faith in the impossibilities of life. The tiniest of miracles that God can work were within our reach and I was excited to see what the next week held. I sent a text to our families and a small group of my closest friends with our exciting news. We were all praying, believing and looking forward to the next appointment.

The next appointment finally rolled around and we took a final peek at our baby. Sadly, the news was the same, the baby hadn’t grown and I was still measuring at 7 weeks and 1 day. The doctor gave us our options and we decided to give it a few days to see if my body would naturally “do its thing” or if I would have to schedule another appointment to finish out the process.

We relayed the news to our family and friends and began the waiting game to see what our next step would be. This time, the appointment didn’t seem so rough. The initial shock had worn off from our last appointment and we were just left with our feelings of sadness and loss.

My body ended up not taking care of the natural process, so I scheduled an appointment to have everything removed. The procedure was quick and uneventful, but provided me a day of much-needed rest. Now, we’re just waiting on a follow-up appointment with my doctor to clear us so that we can start over again.

Curveballs come through our lives when we least expect them. There’s really no way to prevent them, but we can overcome them. The only way I know how to overcome them is by having God a daily part of my life. With Him, curveballs come and go, lessons are learned and life moves forward. With Him, the life moving forward part is so much easier and peaceful and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Rest in peace, Baby Hyden! God took you home at 7 weeks and 1 day, but we know we’ll see you again very soon. Mommy & Daddy love you & miss you so very much!!

Sonogram Pic 2