SIDS Cont'd 2

How are you doing this morning? Blessed, as we wake up we have another day of God's grace and mercy. We have another opportunity to get it right, to do better than we did yesterday. As I continue to share my personal experience with SIDS today I will be talking more about how God continued to keep me in what I must say is one of the lowest points in my life. I stated earlier that I was walking around in a fog so there will be a lot that I can't share, I know I made it because I am here today but I do have gaps in my memory and over the years I have come to realize that it was part of the divine protection of God. If I would have been fully there who knows what choices and decisions I would have made and how much I would have hurt myself and others during that time. So today I can say that I am truly grateful for that. I will be talking today about the birth of my first child after losing my daughter. Just in case you didn't read the previous post here is a little snap of what happened. October 17, 1994 my daughter was born, August 1, 1995 was my birthday, August 6 or 7, 1995 found out I was pregnant, August 13, 1995 my daughter passed away from SIDS. I'm pregnant at home on a leave of absence from college, working and trying to keep my relationship together. I am very sick going back and forth to the doctors; it's getting further into my pregnancy and my relationship is going down fast we spend more time arguing than getting along and we decide to break up. We ended up having a big blow up and physical altercation that finally resulted in him moving out. Once he moved out we spent some time not speaking because I was really hurt about the altercation. I couldn't believe that he would do this to me knowing that I grew up being abused plus the fact that he was always my protector. I just wasn't comfortable with what had happened. Slowly but surely we began to speak again and I finally agreed to meet with him. We went to dinner and he apologized and we began to spend more and more time together because I loved him and wanted him to be a part of our child's life. I still wouldn't allow him to move back in but I did begin spending the nights with him where he was staying. I was spending more and more time with him because I was still very ill with my pregnancy. My doctor finally told me I had to stop working because I was in so much pain, and he wanted me to rest as much as possible. I was getting shooting pains in my lower back that would affect my legs and I couldn't move or walk. He really wanted to help me so I eventually agreed to stay with him during the last two months of my pregnancy. I had a Healthy Start nurse that would come to visit me on a regular basis and she would always ask me about my daughter but I never wanted to talk to her about her. She kept asking if I had been back to the grave site and I told her no. She kept trying to get me to go and I wouldn't, I couldn't understand then why she wanted me to go so bad. She kept telling me I needed to go, I needed to grieve my daughter because I hadn't done so and I told her I wasn't ready to go back to the grave. She would ask me week after week so finally I gave in and told her I would go. So, the next week she took me and needless to say when I got home I just stayed in the bed the rest of the day crying and in a lot of pain. Later on the evening when everyone was sleep I had to go to the bathroom and while I was going to the bathroom my water broke and I went in labor. The surprise was I wasn't due until March 28, 1996 and it was March 7, 1996. I go to the hospital and have a healthy baby boy. I was very happy he was born but I was so hurt and scared I didn't know what to do. They asked if I wanted him to come home on a monitor but I decided against it because the monitor went off so much when we were in the hospital I knew it would drive me crazy. The monitor was to watch the breathing patterns of the baby and an alarm would sound when they stopped breathing but the monitor is super sensitive and was always going off and just made me more nervous. Now It's time to go home and I'm back at my apartment. At this point my life as I once knew it has changed. I no longer sleep, every little noise and sound I'm up checking on my baby, if he's sleep to long I'm checking on him, if he's gurgling his milk I'm checking on him. I would literally would go in his room put my hand or head on his chest to make sure he was breathing. My son is now like a month old and he's breathing real funny I don't know what going on so I instantly take him to the emergency room they give him a breathing treatment, then a second, then the doctors start examining him well the end result is he has asthma, chronic asthma which begins a cycle of endless trips to the doctors and emergency room. We were at the emergency room so much all the doctors and nurses knew us by name. But the visits weren't limited to asthma, he had major ear infections all the time, croup, mono, you name it my son seem to have caught it. I can't even tell you how many times I was at the hospital over the first three years of his life. I was so focused on my son and his well being that I couldn't focus on me and I still didn't grieve the loss of my daughter. All I could think about was my son and him living. God knew I couldn't handle, it know he had me endure all this with my son because had I grieved at that time I really would have not been able to be the mom to my child I needed to be. I was to focused on him to focus on me. I was attending my parent meetings at CFE, working, taking care of my son and I even attempted going back to school. This is where I began to keep myself so busy that I didn't feel the pain and hurt of not having my daughter. Although I had all of this going when my son was about two I was still feeling this tugging at my heart, this emptiness, this pain that I just couldn't ignore. I was missing my daughter and I wanted another daughter. I was no longer with my son's father and I was in a newer relationship and I shared my feelings with him and I told him I want a baby. I was just in a place where I wanted the pain to stop and I thought by having another baby girl it would help but I wasn't listening to the signs and signals God was giving me. I wasn't looking at the fact that I needed to grieve, heal and grow I wanted it fixed and fixed now. I thought by having another baby it would do the trick and that's what I did......I took the steps to become pregnant again. I got off depo provera and began trying to have another daughter.......stay tuned for some more of the process......


Many Blessings & Much Love