A Huge Sigh of Relief

We had quite a scare earlier this week and I’m just starting to breath easier again. On Monday we had an appointment with our midwife. We were about 16.5 weeks along and I had been looking forward to this appointment for a long time. For some reason I had been feeling uneasy about my pregnancy for a couple of weeks. I kept saying “Scott, I AM pregnant, right?!?!” He assured me that I was hormonal, tired, and difficult to live with and that yes, even though I’m not huge yet, I have more of a belly than I otherwise would have (such a sweet husband, isn’t he?!?). Actually, he wasn’t quite that blunt, in fact, he was very supportive and reassured me on numerous occasions that things were just fine. At the start of our appointment, I expressed some of these fears to the midwife and said that I’ve just been anxious for a couple weeks now to hear the heartbeat and know that everything was normal in there.

She suggested we listen to the heartbeat first thing so that I could put those worries to rest before carrying on with the rest of our time together. I lay on the table and she spent about 10 minutes with her little machine trying to listen. She kept touching my wrist to feel my pulse to make sure she wasn’t hearing my heartbeat on the machine. Camden was with us and was getting loud and antsy so she asked Scott to step out with him for a moment so she could really concentrate. We knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what. She explained to us that the baby’s heart rate was only around 80 beats per minute (at our 12 week checkup it had been around 160 bpm) so it was about half of where it should be. She explained that this meant there was potentially something congenitally wrong with the heart, that it was developing incorrectly, and that this was something very worrisome. She immediately called up to Dartmouth-Hitchcock to try to get us an appointment, and we ended up sitting in silence for the next 20 minutes waiting for the specialist up there to call us back. We were tense and nervous, there were tears and lots and lots of fear of the unknown. It turned out they couldn’t see us until the next day, but assured us that nothing would change with our baby between now and then.

We spent the remainder of that day and all night on Monday fearing the worst. Our midwife had painted a bleak picture, explaining scenarios ranging from the baby not being viable outside of the womb, to fetal surgery (I didn’t even know there was such a thing!), to having an early delivery around 32 weeks with a surgeon standing by to perform heart surgery on our newborn.

The fears flooded over us – what would we do if this child wasn’t “viable?” Doctors could always be wrong, so we would never terminate the pregnancy, but how could I possibly stand answering strangers questions in late summer when the cheerfully asked me “when are you due?” “Are you having a boy or a girl?”…I can’t even imagine knowing that my child wasn’t going to make it, yet carrying it to term – although we were preparing ourselves to do that if necessary. We were thinking through other scenarios as well…what if we had to deliver in Boston (a possibility they had mentioned to us) and live down there with our newborn in the NICU…what would we do with Camden? What about Scott’s job? What if this child did get surgery and survived, would he or she be able to play sports and be a normal, active child or would we be dealing with a medical issue for the rest of our lives? We didn’t get much sleep that night, and drove up to DHMC believing that any news other than this baby isn’t viable would be good news. We were prepared for the worst, yet obviously hoping for the best. We had told a few of our closest friends and family and they had been praying faithfully for us over the last 24 hours. We knew we would have support no matter what happened, and we knew we had to trust God with whatever He handed us, but we were fearing the worst. After an anxious wait in the waiting room I laid down on the table and Scott grabbed my hand. The technician got started and checked the heart rate right away…149 bmp!!! A huge sigh of relief swept over us, yet we were still nervous to see what the heart looked like on the ultrasound and to make sure everything else looked healthy. We spent a good 45 minutes with the technician. She was great, super nice and encouraging even though she wasn’t really supposed to interpret anything she was seeing. Throughout that time she checked the heart rate on the screen multiple times and it varied from 147-158! What a miracle!!!

Seriously, God answered our prayers. The doctor came in and said, “You have such a cute baby!” and assured us that she didn’t see any cause for concern. The joy and relief that we felt in that moment was absolutely overwhelming. The doctor left the room ahead of us and we just stopped and hugged…so thankful for this blessing.

We still don’t know what went wrong on Monday. Our midwife just delivered my friend Molly’s baby and it was her 4,992nd delivery (twins only count as one delivery and c-sections aren’t included because they didn’t end up being “her birth”). Needless to say, she’s very experienced and has listened to her share of heartbeats in her lifetime so it’s difficult to think that she wasn’t hearing it correctly. She just left our home about 15 minutes ago after coming over to our house for a home visit! She had to pick up her daughter on campus, so she came early and spent 45 minutes talking with us and helping us through the week we’ve had! To help us lower any stress we might be feeling about the baby’s heart rate, she taught us how to use her doppler stick and left it with a bottle of ultrasound gel for us to check the baby’s heartbeat on our own if we ever feel anxious about it! Pretty amazing to have such personalized care! Our baby's heart rate tonight was right where it should be! YAY!!! We are going to be monitoring the baby extra throughout the pregnancy, and we have another ultrasound in two weeks to check on it again. We're not completely out of the woods yet (because if the baby's heart rate is fluctuating THAT much, that's not good), but at least we know nothing is congenitally wrong with the heart.

We are so thankful and humbled this week. Life has thrown us some pretty crazy curve balls this year, and we are so thankful that we have God to lean on during these difficult times. We are amazed by the support and prayers of friends and family and are just hoping our little one won’t give us any more scares this pregnancy! I’m 17 weeks today and hoping, praying and trusting for a healthy rest of the pregnancy!