Judged

Do you ever feel judged?

I do sometimes. A lot actually. When people I don't know very well find out I have 3 children who died. I can see they are thinking "what did she do?" And when they find out it was at birth. I see the looks and questions of "what kind of drugs was she taking?"  If only it were that easy right. When people find out that I was on paper "induced" with Joshua, I wonder if they think I didn't try hard enough. I feel sometimes I tried harder with the girls. For the simple fact that I made it almost a week after Hopes water broke before having her and Faith. And with Joshua I only made it 2 days. When actually I didn't do anything different. I made no choices. I let what was to be to be. I followed the advice of my OB and tried to hang on to the lives that were growing inside of me. 

The fact of the matter is that It probably wouldn't make a difference no matter what I did. When your water brakes before viability (23ish weeks) your chances of taking home a baby are less than 1%. Yes there it is as soon as my water broke I had less than a 1% chance of ever bringing home my baby. I understand why some women give up and induce immediately. I don't judge them. It's physically and mentally draining to continue a pregnancy when you know that your baby has a 99% chance of dying no matter how far you carry him. Even if you somehow make it to 34 weeks your baby still has a 1% chance of life outside the womb. I decided that 1% was enough of a chance to fight for so I did. I fought and I lost. 

I think now though that maybe God did know what he was doing not letting me get further than I did. Sometime I have questioned why he couldn't give me just another few days of pregnancy so that Joshua would be seen as a stillbirth and not a miscarriage in the eyes of the state. At 20 weeks in Alabama you can get a Certificate of Birth resulting in a Stillbirth from vital records. At 19.4 weeks you get nothing from the state reconizeing you baby lived. The girls were 17.2 so they got didn't get anything either. I have questioned why I couldn't carry them longer to feel them move more. To know them more. However I can see how he knew that I needed to let go sooner rather than later because if a 1% chance of surviving the pregnancy was enough then a 1% chance of living outside the womb was going to be enough as well. 

I wonder if I had made it to viability how far I would have pushed to keep them alive. 

Since having the girls I have remembered a baby that was in the nicu with Landon. I remember that when Landon was so weak and small that this other baby had a mobile over his crib. I remember the nurses playing music and videos for him. I remember this baby sitting in the swing and I remember his parent called 3 times a day to check on him and visited on Sundays. I remember one Sunday I was visiting Landon and his mother was there. The nurses were telling the mother the drs were thinking of sending him home soon and wanted her to come stay overnight to do total care for him the next weekend. She answered with she would have to talk with his father but thought they could both be there the next Saturday. When they were done she asked me how Landon was doing. I told her good despite being born at 31 weeks he was doing well. I asked about her baby and she told me that he was born at 35 weeks. Her water broke at 18 weeks and he was still on O2 I asked how old he was and was shocked to find out he was turning a year that week! Yes the baby had spent a whole year in the nicu. He did go home the next weekend. I told the mom good luck. She said the same to me. She was being sent home with what I would call a home nicu. The monitors and O2 were all going with that baby. My guess is they trained the mother to care for him at home because he was stable. I wonder now of that baby is now 8 years old and doing well. If he made it. I wonder why I didn't remember that mother when I was laying there trying to hang on. If I had would I have chosen differently? Honestly I don't know. I know I told my OB that the choice oft children living and dying couldn't be mine. That it wasn't up to me. I still believe that, of course. But I think I understand now more than I did before why God said no after my water broke. Why he took them when he did. I still don't understand why my water had to brake in the first place though. 

 I know not all Pprom babies spend a year in the nicu. There is that .5% that are healthy and normal and have no problems from having no fluid. And I'm glad they are thriving. But it's just not the way it turns out for most families. And not wanting you baby to spend his whole life on O2 in the hospital is not a bad thing. I wouldn't want that for my children.