Losing Our Baby Boy: Still Born

 Mid pandemic we found out we were pregnant with our second perfect baby.

With the pandemic and the shift in how we access medical care, I had only one in person appointment and one phone appointment with my doctor over the span of 21 weeks.

I had a couple small subcutaneous bleeds but with the fear of going to the hospital that I’ve come to find was pretty common, I didn’t go. 

I got to nearly 22 weeks when I started seeing signs of labour that felt just a bit too real. I thought Braxton hicks were reasonable at this stage so I passed the mild and random contractions I was having off as that. I had discharge that was suspect but I thought there was no way I was in labour this early. My first son tried to come early a couple years before this, he tried at 28 weeks and I went on bedrest to keep him stayed put. During that, I struggled through loneliness, aimlessness, and depression, and I was already mentally prepared to do it again to finish this pregnancy with a healthy and happy baby. I called the maternity triage nurse at the hospital to ask her opinion on my symptoms. She said based on my previous pregnancy and how mild the contractions sounded, she wasn’t immediately concerned, but best to come in and check. So I did. I arrived and waited 3 hours for a physical exam. Once I got in, I tuned out a doctor winding up to tell me how I’m wasting her time and I should be at home so she can take care of women in real labour, as she jammed a speculum in to take a swab. I'm never seeing that doctor again... Then she gasped. 

She said I was at least 8cm dilated, my membranes had started to move through my cervix, and there was no hope of stopping labour. She said she anticipated the baby would be born before morning. She told me that this early in a pregnancy, these situations were basically treated like a miscarriage. The baby was likely to be born alive but that it was too underdeveloped and had no chance for survival. The best I could do at that point is push through labour and do my best to make my son comfortable until he passed away. 

That was a terrible doctor. She wasn’t just abrupt, she was verbally rude and physically aggressive. Then when she saw how close I was to active labour, she flipped a weird switch and started almost crying. That’s why I say she is terrible. It was so insincere and almost manipulative, like she was expecting some big reaction, and was feeding off of it somehow. I wanted her to leave so I could call my husband to come (because at the time hospitals weren’t allowing partners unless it was for sure that you were either about to have a baby or about to die) and she wouldn’t leave the room. She continued well past the point of understanding and tried to drive it home even more; we could see in ultrasound that he was alive, so my baby was probably going to die in my hands, and he would be in pain! Thanks doc, get out! 

I sent my messages and my husband came as fast as he could, getting a friend who lived close to come stay with our first boy for the night. He arrived and I couldn’t keep it together any longer. Then my water started leaking and we got wheeled to a room. It took all of 3 hours to finish dilating and start pushing. The same doctor came back to deliver my baby. Joy. She aggressively palpated my water during a contraction which broke it, flipped the baby so that he was breach, and somewhere in the middle of that I started to hemorrhage. My placenta had started to pull away from my uterus wall before it was ready. It took just 3 more hours of hemorrhaging and labour, and aggressive internal baby grabbing by the doctor, to get my baby out. The hemorrhage ended up being a miracle I think. My placenta started to pull away and my boy suffocated in utero. He never got to experience the joys of this world, and dying before being delivered meant he didn’t have to experience the suffering of it either. Seeing as he wasn’t going to survive, I would take hemorrhaging again for that small blessing. 

He was born at 3:01 am. He was a little head-heavy, but perfect. His eyes were still fused shut, but his fingers, toes, arms, legs and face were all fully formed and clean. He had no fat on him at all, but it was easy to see he looked like his dad and was built like a tank. He was just under a pound, and just under a foot long. Big for his age. My sweet calm boy looked at peace.

Then I had to come back to reality. I was losing a lot of blood and needed drugs. I lost just enough to merit a transfusion but that would require a 24 hour hospital stay for monitoring and that silly doctor thought I could probably recuperate more comfortably on my own at home… That, or she thought the maternity ward didn’t have enough beds and didn't consider that I could be transferred somewhere else. I’m willing to bet the latter, but I can’t prove it. I have made notes with my regular hospital, my general practitioner and specialists that this particular doctor is never to come anywhere near me or my family ever again. I know I am well within my rights to have that enforced. Thank Goodness.

I had a bag of oxytocin and antibiotics put on my IV drip to try and stop the bleeding. It took about an hour all said and done. I delivered the placenta and overheard that my umbilical cord was extremely short. All these things should have been signs, and I should have advocated for myself and investigated further, and the reason for that will be in another post. 

The nurse made sure I was settled and safe, then excused herself to run back and forth gathering supplies and means of making keepsakes that we could take home with us. She offered us a cuddle cot, which is basically a hospital bassinet with an icepack mattress so that the decay of the body would be slowed and we could take our time and say goodbye. I knew for my own mental health the longer I held on to him the more of a mess I'd be and the harder time I’d have letting him go. So I told my husband that when he was ready, we could send the baby away.  I held my boy, took some pictures, and then couldn’t force myself to stay awake any longer. I slept hard for a few hours and when I woke up, he was gone. My husband had taken a few more pictures, had his cuddles and said goodbye, and the nurse came and took him to the morgue. We were offered an autopsy, but declined. We should have done it, and now that’s what I tell people. Push for more information, even when you’re hurting. You don’t have to look at that information and process it right away, but you might want it later, and especially in a country with government funded healthcare, there isn’t a good reason not to. We did want that information later, and now we don’t have it. 

I showered, felt the effects of blood loss, lay down again, and had my hospital discharge check-up. We were home by 9:00am and it was surreal. Both like the world had stopped turning, and at the same time, like nothing had happened. My friend had put my first son down for his morning nap, and stayed so my husband and I could sleep without worrying about him, and the day moved forward.

Because our baby had made it past 20 weeks his remains had to be treated like those of a legal person, (such a weird thing to say, to me he was a person well before 20 weeks) and so we had to book in with a funeral home and have him either embalmed or cremated, at which point we could decide how we wanted him buried. I couldn’t handle that last bit. So we had him cremated and he lives in a wooden urn that my husband built and the funeral home engraved with his foot prints, on our dresser in our room. And that’s where he’ll stay for now. Where we live we found that if it’s your own private property (not strata or a park or something like that) and the remains are cremated, you can bury or scatter them on your property. So maybe that’s what we’ll do when we find our more permanent home. Or I’ll hold onto that box until I die and he’ll be buried with me. I don’t know. It’s been almost a year and I still haven’t found it in me to revisit that decision. Healthy or not. I don’t know. I’m pursuing counseling, but hey man, it’s hard.

I learned a lot of things through this experience. I learned I can refuse a doctor's care and the hospital has to get me a different one. I learned that even ‘C-’ doctors get jobs. I learned that I should know what a placenta looks like in person (more on this in the next post), and I learned that funeral homes can be really accommodating. The one we went with sort of subsidized costs for parents parting with children, by increasing everyone else’s fees by a little bit in order to cover at least half the cost for people in our type of situation. We learned this is actually fairly common. 

If you know me, you know I’m happy to talk to anyone that’s judgement free about any of my experiences if it helps others learn or get better care. So if you have questions, please ask.