A Pain Like No Other….
It’s Sunday night. I just finished baking a Mexican treat, and now I sit in my living room watching a movie. There is a scene where a man loses his wife to a robbery gone wrong, and it follows him through his journey with grief. Suddenly I feel a knot in my throat and tears come rolling down my face. And just like that, the trauma comes flooding back like it happened yesterday. Grief is a sneaky bitch. When you think the coast is clear, you are reliving it five years later.
Never have I spoken of the morning I lost my son in such detail to a large audience, but I’m ready to share my story. It begins on October 23, 2021, at 3:00 a.m., and I was awakened with stomach pains. At first, I thought it might be Braxton Hicks because I was only 28 weeks along. The pain got stronger, so I told my then-husband that I was in pain, but he told me, “It’s probably nothing.” I lay back down, but the pain continued, so I woke him up again. This time we got ready and headed to the hospital.
Once there, I had to enter on my own because of COVID policies. I registered, advising them the contractions were five minutes apart, and they had me take a seat in the lobby. Thirty minutes rolled by, and still my name wasn’t called. The pain continued, but by this time the contractions were two minutes apart. I walked to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and started to push until I realized that I could deliver right then and there, because my baby wouldn’t have immediate care. I got up and went back to the lobby. By then, the pain had me wailing so loudly that a man walking by asked if I was okay.
Finally, an hour later, they opened the lobby door and called my name. They rolled in a wheelchair, and I sat in it. Immediately, I felt this immense pressure, and I somehow had this maternal instinct that it was time. I opened my legs and moved my underwear to the side to make room for him. He came right out. There I was being rolled to the emergency room, with little to no urgency, holding my son in my hands. He was so small, so precious. We finally got to the emergency room, still with no urgency, until one nurse stood up and looked down at me from behind the counter and saw me holding my son. Then they rushed to cut the cord. They rushed him upstairs to the NICU. I saw my then-husband walk in, but they quickly rushed him upstairs to see Jace. I stayed behind. I was in immense pain from them physically removing the placenta. Then a woman grabbed my left hand to start an IV, and I yelled out from the pain. It felt as if she stabbed me.
After all the commotion, my then-husband was at the foot of my bed, and he just had this look on his face. Then the words poured out of his mouth like lava melting my soul: “He didn’t make it.” But the pain didn’t stop there. We had to go upstairs to verbally tell them to stop resuscitation. When the nurse who was attending to me heard I had to go upstairs, she immediately said, “No, she has to stay down here for observation.” The NICU nurse who had escorted my then-husband downstairs began arguing with her. The arguing went on for a minute until the NICU nurse sat me in a wheelchair and escorted us upstairs. Upon arrival, I saw a doctor doing chest compressions, and that was the moment we had to make the decision that changed my whole life.