Jude’s Birth Story, part 1

Navigating a second pregnancy after my firstborn died as an infant was not without its challenges. It certainly did not help that the two pregnancy timelines were identical, with due dates only 6 days apart. It often made me feel like I had to relive the trauma of my first pregnancy over again, like history would repeat itself.

In order to paint the picture of Jude’s birth accurately, I will need to journey back to Eden’s for a bit. At the end of my pregnancy with her, I was getting monitoring twice a week due to the high risk of stillbirth in Trisomy 13 pregnancies. She struggled to thrive at the end, and I began to notice decreased movements and slowed growth in the final weeks of pregnancy. My last monitoring appointment with her was October 14th, 2020. I was admitted straight from the appointment after being told that her placenta was no longer giving her adequate blood flow. Once I was attached to the monitors in the labor and delivery department, we quickly realized that she was not handling my contractions well. Her heart rate dipped each time I had a contraction, leading to a very long night and a c-section delivery the next morning.

Flash forward to Jude. It had been an uncomplicated pregnancy. I was reassured by my medical team over and over again that this was going to be a different story. Jude was not like Eden. Jude was healthy. We were going to take him home. His growth was consistently promising, and he seemed to be thriving. The last few weeks of my pregnancy, I felt a clear shift happen inside me. I had an overwhelming sense that something bad was going to happen. It was different from the anxiety that I already had about navigating pregnancy after loss. I counted down the days to my scheduled c-section, urging Jude to hang on just a little longer.

I did kick counts daily, sometimes multiple times a day. I would lie awake at night, sometimes all night long, paying attention to his movements. I could not get out of bed in the morning to start my day until I felt him kick a few times. My fear of stillbirth was intense and debilitating. I worried that I would not be able to survive losing another child. I talked about these fears with my doctors, but they all reassured me that Jude was doing just fine.

On the morning of November 8th, 2021, I got dressed for work. I snapped a mirror picture of my bump before I left, because I couldn’t believe how big me and Jude were getting. I sat at my desk drinking coffee, prepping my notes for the day ahead. It occurred to me that I hadn’t felt Jude kick since I had been drinking my coffee. Jude seemed to like my morning Starbucks as much as I did, so this was unusual for him. I decided to go into my treatment room and lie down on my left side to do a kick count. Usually, it only took Jude about 20 minutes to kick 10 times in those same conditions, lying on my left side. This time, I barely felt anything at all. There was a questionable wiggle and movement here and there, but it was definitely not his norm. I called my OB’s office. The nurse I spoke to did not seem too concerned, but I told her that I would like to come in as soon as possible. I got a call about an hour later giving me the go-ahead to come in for a non-stress test.

I was no stranger to non-stress tests, because I had so many of them with Eden. They usually took about 20 minutes and were not too much of a hassle. I felt immediately at ease when I heard Jude’s heartbeat on the monitor. Every once in a while, a nurse would come in, look at the strip, ask me to change positions, then leave. I must have been there for close to an hour when my OB and two other nurses came into my room. I’ve been through enough trauma in my life to know what bad news looks like, and bad news was written all over my doctor’s face. She asked me when I had last eaten, and told me that she would like to deliver Jude as soon as possible via c-section. She asked me to go home and pack my things, and then head to labor and delivery. I told her that if it was urgent, I’d rather take an ambulance than take any chances, but I was told that it would be okay to drive myself.

The next hour was a bit of a blur. I didn’t give myself any permission to be scared. I couldn’t fall apart. I had a job to do. At some point, I called Baylor and my mom. I texted my manager that I would not be coming back to work. We made it to the hospital where I was admitted to labor and delivery. Jude was not having heart rate accelerations that a healthy 38-week-old fetus should have, nor was he moving enough. Occasionally, he would have heart rate drops. When that happened, I was suddenly transported back to October 14th, 2020. I wondered how this could possibly be happening to me again. My life began to feel like a big cosmic joke. I questioned why my body seemed to be so determined to harm my babies.

The nurses and my OB became increasingly concerned as the hours went on. She had previously told me she wanted to hold off on delivering until 8 hours after my last meal. She later told me that she would like to deliver Jude sooner than that, because she didn’t feel comfortable waiting any longer. After preparing myself for an emergency c-section that was taking place sooner than I was told it would, a nurse then came in and informed me that I had lost the operating room, and we’d need to wait for another one to open up. I continued to watch concerned doctors and nurses looking at my son’s heart rate strip. I tried not to think about what would happen if things took a sudden turn for the worse. Baylor and my mom served as a welcome distraction as we waited for the operating room to become available. I was also visited by Sarah, who was my labor and delivery nurse with Eden. She talked with me and prayed for me and Jude, which brought me a much-needed moment of peace.

Around 7pm, I was wheeled back to the operating room for my c-section. I spent a very long 20 minutes separated from Baylor while I got my spinal tap. I kept my eyes glued to my OB’s face, because she was not hiding her concern from me. If anyone was going to be honest with me, it was her. When I asked for updates, I was told “he’s just telling us he needs to be born right now.” At some point, Jude was cut out of me. I waited to hear the cry that I’d been imagining, but I didn’t hear it. I caught a glimpse of him across the room, being assessed by a doctor and NICU nurses. His skin was white as a sheet. Healthy newborns flex their hips and knees, but Jude was sprawled out and limp. He finally left out a little cry when they suctioned him, but it wasn’t the kind of cry I would have attributed to a healthy full-term baby.

I heard myself asking them what was wrong, but it felt more like a dream than reality. I was reassured over and over again that Jude was just fine. They gave him supplemental oxygen. I overheard the nurses whispering about his complexion, and one of them motioned to me and said “well… mom is pale.” as if that was a satisfactory explanation for my pale, weak newborn. Eventually, they swaddled him up and brought him over to me. The NICU team said he was doing okay, and they left. The labor and delivery nurse brought him to me, but said was not stable enough for skin-to-skin. Ironically, even Eden had been stable enough for skin-to-skin. They held him close to my face so I could see him.

I remember coaching myself, “this is your son. You’re meeting him for the first time. You need to be happy. You need to smile for the picture.”

But I didn’t even feel like I was there at that moment. I did the best I could to convince myself things were going okay, but nothing made any sense. I looked at Jude and thought “he looks so much like Eden”. For a fleeting moment, I thought maybe he was Eden. Maybe that’s why he was misbehaving so much. They whisked him away to the nursery to be cared for. Again, I was told that he was fine. I wasn’t buying it.

I was stitched back up and sent to post-op recovery on my own. For my entire pregnancy with Jude, I didn’t know whether I was going to have a VBAC or a c-section. I didn’t really care what kind of delivery I had, but the one thing I desired more than anything was to not have to be separated from my baby. I wanted Jude to stay with me in postpartum recovery, because the hardest part of Eden’s birthday was having to spend most of it separated from her. But there I was, alone in recovery and separated from Jude for the first time in 9 months. Not at all feeling safe, seen, or heard. I couldn’t have cared less about what was happening with my body that was just operated on, I just wanted them to take me to Jude. He wasn’t okay, and for some reason no one else seemed to be acknowledging that but me.

I spent the next several hours pushing through the pain to meet the milestones that the nurses told me I needed to accomplish to be able to go to the nursery to see him. Late that night, Baylor wheeled me to the nursery where I saw Jude attached to monitors. This was not an unfamiliar sight for me, because my babies being attached to tubes and monitors was practically all I knew at that point. I breastfed him for the first time. Another moment I had pictured and looked forward to my whole life. He latched right away and seemed to be a natural at it, but then his oxygen saturations dipped down to the 80’s. I heard the familiar sound of the alarms, and this triggered a response in me as I was again transported back to my time with Eden. I asked the nurse why he would be having oxygen desaturations, and she answered that sometimes even full-term babies have a difficult time adjusting to life outside the womb. I told her that it seemed like Jude should be going to the NICU rather than staying in the nursery, but she told me that wasn’t necessary.

As I was being told these reassuring things, I echoed them to myself. I dismissed my own fears and chalked them up to unresolved trauma. Jude will be fine, I said to myself. He is alive. He is here. Just try to be happy.

Baylor and I went back to my room and tried to get some rest. We were awakened early in the morning by my nurse rushing into my room with a wheelchair. She told me I needed to get up, and that Jude was going to the NICU. His lab work showed that his hemoglobin was critically low and he needed a blood transfusion immediately. I was wheeled behind Jude in his incubator, being transported by the exact same transport nurse that took Eden to the NICU a year earlier. It didn’t take long for her to put two and two together.

As we entered the familiar hallways of the NICU, I heard her telling people…

“This is Eden’s little brother.”

I’m recounting these memories as the mom of a thriving, happy, and healthy 7-month-old baby boy. Even though my mind knows Jude is okay, my heart is racing as I type this. I am holding back tears. It brings up unwelcomed feelings like anger, guilt, and anxiety. I’m not saying these things are right or wrong to feel, but just that they are a continual struggle even now. As a mom who has lived through the worst-case-scenario of postpartum, the death of my baby, it’s been hard for me to wrap my brain around the idea that it’s still valid to grieve the fact that Jude’s birth wasn’t what I wanted it to be. My gut reaction is to shove these feelings of anger and grief over Jude’s birth way down deep, attempting to suffocate them with the sentiment of just being grateful that he’s here and okay. But unfortunately, it has not been that simple. I have come to realize that I will probably be processing through these memories for a long time, and that’s okay. In part 2 of Jude’s birth story, I will share about our experience navigating an unexpected NICU stay and what it was like to finally bring him home. There were so many redemptive moments that happened, but in order to fully appreciate those moments, we need to discuss the hard parts too.

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