Lost and Found

This is the second part of my personal testimony as to the Lord’s working in my life. The nice thing about Facebook posts is that you can read them, ignore them, scroll past them and, sometimes, glean a little wisdom or learn something new or just get a good laugh out of them. Feel free to get what you choose out of mine. My hope is that it will reach a friend or the friend of a friend who’ll get something positive out of it. So here is part two of my testimony, which I’ll call “Lost and Found”. I’m going to post it in two parts because it’s pretty long.

To begin with, a little history to put things into context. In the late 1940’s to the early 1970’s many women in America were given a medication called Diethylstilbestrol or DES, a synthetic form of estrogen, during their pregnancies. The intention of the medication was to have been to help women who had experienced multiple miscarriages to carry their babies to term. Unfortunately, not only did it not actually cut down the rate of miscarriages, but it also had several serious side effects. It raised the chances of both the mother and her baby’s risks of certain sexual organ cancers. It also caused many of the girl babies to be born with what was called an ‘incompetent cervix’ and other birth defects, which meant that the cervix was not formed properly and was very thin and weak. In laymen’s terms, once the baby got big enough to put pressure on the cervix it would begin to soften and open up, causing premature birth. I discovered that I was a DES child when I went to my first visit with a gynecologist and he found the thin cervix, as well as precancerous changes to the cells of my cervix. He told me then, at the age of 18 and after having already suffered two miscarriages, that I’d likely never be able to carry a child to term without having to have a ‘cerclage’ surgery to sew my cervix shut at three months gestation. Since I’d lost both of my former pregnancies before the 12-week mark, he assured me that those miscarriages probably didn’t have anything to do with the DES exposure. I found out later that wasn’t true. DES also caused my brother to develop testicular cancer that nearly killed him in his early twenties, as well as causing me to have pre-cancerous growths that culminated in my having to have a total hysterectomy at the age of 25. DES was a disaster that caused the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of women and their children in the U.S. and countless more around the world.

When I remarried at 19, my new husband and I knew that having children was going to be a complicated and difficult thing. Having just suffered two miscarriages in my first marriage, I was in no rush to try again. However, my husband was 10 years older than I was and at 29 he was eager to start a family. So, we decided to forgo birth control and let God and nature decide when our family would begin. Within a couple of months, I started to have morning sickness. Sadly, before we could get to our first obstetric appointment, I miscarried once again.

Six months into our first year together I conceived once more. By this time, I had convinced myself that God didn’t want me to have a family for some reason, so I refused to allow myself to get excited at all about the pregnancy. Two months passed – still pregnant. Three months and our first ultrasound – still pregnant and everything seemed perfect. Four months in and the obstetrician sat down with us to discuss doing a cerclage, the surgery to sew the cervical opening shut, preventing it (if it worked properly) from opening prematurely and causing a miscarriage/premature birth. There were several possible complications, including the surgery itself causing a miscarriage, infections and possible hemorrhaging due to the stitches tearing out. We decided to keep a close eye on the situation and put off doing a cerclage unless there were signs of a problem. The next month we moved from Omaha to Clarksburg, WV, where my now ex-husband was slated to do his residency in Family Practice. At that point, all seemed to be going well and there were no signs of problems with the baby or the pregnancy at all. I was seeing the obstetrician weekly, just to keep a close eye on things.

At six months along, I went to my weekly visit with my new obstetrician. He did the typical exam and declared that all was well. My husband and I sighed with relief that it appeared we might not have to do a cerclage at all, mitigating the chances of negative complications. We returned home with lighter hearts. The next day, a Saturday, I was lying on the sofa, relaxing and watching a movie on TV, when I felt a strange gurgling in my stomach. Thinking it was probably just gas, I didn’t grow alarmed until I stood up to go use the bathroom, only to have my water break. I was immediately terrified. Sometime during that 24-hour period my cervix had opened up and allowed the gestational sac to enter the birth canal, causing the sac to burst and putting me into premature labor.

 Nowadays, babies born at 26 weeks almost routinely survive, most without issues. In 1981 however, babies that premature rarely survived and those that did often had lifelong issues. I called out to my husband and he came running from the kitchen. He quickly realized what was going on. We called the obstetrician’s answering service and then headed for the hospital, both of us horrified and frightened, praying together along the way for our baby’s life.

The hospital in Clarksburg did their best to stop my labor but to no avail. It was decided that the baby would have the best chance of survival if I were to give birth in the Women’s and Children’s hospital in Pittsburg. They loaded me onto a helicopter and flew off in the middle of a rainy dark night. Four hours after I arrived there, my first child, a perfect, beautiful little girl was born. They whisked her off to the PICU at once, never allowing me to hold her. My husband, who’d followed in our car, arrived soon afterward. We waited for hours before we were allowed to go and see our daughter. We’d named her Elizabeth Kathleen. It was heartbreaking to see her lying there, so fragile and alone, covered in tubes and equipment. We could only reach in and stroke her tiny hands and forehead, unable to give her any comfort.

A few hours later, after I’d returned to my room exhausted and my husband had gone to a local church member’s home to rest for a couple of hours, the NICU physician called my room and urged me to return. Beth, as we’d nicknamed her, wasn’t doing well. I arrived to be told that she had developed an intracranial hemorrhage. In other words, a blood vessel had burst in her brain. Her vital signs were fading, her tiny heart beating slower and slower, her blood pressure was going lower and lower. I asked the doctor if there was any chance she’d survive and he told me that the odds weren’t good. If she did somehow stop bleeding and survive, the lowered oxygen supply to her brain would very likely cause severe brain damage. I stood there beside her, watching her tiny body slowly fading away. I prayed, “Lord, what do I do? What do You want me to do?” I felt a strong certainty in my heart that I should hold her and allow her to pass peacefully in my arms. I asked the doctor to remove the tubes, needles and the ventilator that was forcing air into her fragile lungs. By this time her heartbeat was barely 40 beats per minute and her blood pressure was barely registering. Finally freed from all the painful equipment, Beth was wrapped in a soft blanket and placed in my arms. I sat rocking her and sang her lullabies, promising her that I’d see her again soon and telling her how much her daddy and I loved her. Within a few minutes, after taking a few shallow breaths, Beth took one last gasp for air before her tiny heart stopped. My husband, who’d rushed to the hospital as soon as he'd heard that Beth was dying, arrived just in time for her passing. We sat holding her for a couple of hours, touching her tiny hands and feet and kissing her perfect little face, until it was time to let her go to the morgue.

We returned to my room, devastated, neither of us able to really talk about what had happened. We both eventually fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion, crying ourselves to sleep. Once again, I began to believe that God was never going to allow me to become a mother and that, for some reason, this was His way of punishing me for whatever sins I’d committed. The one thing I’d wanted uppermost all my life - to be a mother - was, from what I could see at that time, never going to be mine. We were completely devastated. The next day they released me from the hospital, and we returned to West Virginia, to the house with the empty nursery. My arms ached from emptiness of the lack of the child that should have been held there. My faith in God was badly tested.

PART TWO:

The weather in West Virginia in late October and early November of that year fit my overall mindset perfectly. It was rainy, gloomy and bone-chillingly humid and cold. After Beth’s funeral in August, attended only by my mother, who was the only family member able to attend due to distance and time constraints, and the other medical residents in the program and their wives, I became severely depressed. Sure that my failures and sins had brought about the death of my daughter, I became more and more isolated, rarely leaving the house or speaking to anyone but my husband. The wives of the other medical residents tried to reach out to me, stopping by to bring a casserole or a book or just to talk. I appreciated the gestures, but I was grieving too deeply to be able to do much more than barely answer their well-meaning questions, tell them thank you and then withdraw into myself again. My husband, Marden, and I barely spoke, walking around the house when he wasn’t at work, like two strangers sharing the same home.

On November 15^th, the day that Beth was supposed to have been due, I awoke in a panic. Dreaming that I could hear Beth crying for me, I’d been frantically looking for her, searching in the darkness as her cries grew ever louder. I woke just as I was jumping out of bed, heading toward the now empty nursery – its contents stored away in the attic upstairs. I made it to the doorway of the bedroom before I regained consciousness enough to realize that I was dreaming and there was no crying. The nursery stood empty, silent and still. After three months, our life was just beginning to fall back into something akin to normal. I no longer spent every day lying on the couch, crying, and we were slowly allowing ourselves to work through the loss of our daughter. I sat down on the edge of the bed and cried for a few minutes, then forced myself to get up and start getting ready for the day.

After being urged by friends and family to investigate adoption, we’d made several phone calls to local social services and local adoption agencies. We quickly learned that the chances of our being able to adopt a baby before at least a seven-year wait would be very unlikely. I felt a horrible hopelessness. My dreams of becoming a mother faded further away each day. Trying to find something to fill my time and get me out of the silent, empty house, I signed up for classes at the local community college in their new physician assistant program. I started classes at the beginning of October, finding it helped at least a little bit to have something that forced me to think about anything other than my loss and the empty nursery at home. Despite the distraction, however, nearly every school day would end with a stop by the little cemetery that lay beside the street that I traveled back and forth from home to school. Sitting beside Beth’s little headstone with the angel inscribed beside her name, the emptiness in my heart was a gaping hole I feared would never be filled.  

November 15^th was a Sunday and Marden was just finishing a 36 hour shift. He returned to the house that morning and we ate a late breakfast together. Afterwards, I sat down to read while he looked over the paper before heading off to bed to get some much-needed rest. A few minutes later, the phone rang. Being before the days of cell phones, our only receiver was in the kitchen, mounted on the wall. Marden went to answer it. I sat, continuing to read but listening to his side of the conversation, thinking he’d probably tell me that it was my mom, calling as she often did on weekend days. However, his side of the conversation didn’t sound at all as I expected it would. At first his voice sounded unsure, almost confused, asking questions and giving short answers – “Yes, yes, okay, I’ll have to talk to Lori. Right. Yes. Okay.” I couldn’t figure out what the subject could possibly be.

After about five minutes, he said goodbye and came into the living room. He had a bemused, almost shocked look on his face. He told me that one of the other medical residents had just called. He’d delivered a newborn earlier that morning in the ER. The baby’s mother was young, unmarried and wanting to give the baby up for adoption. The other resident, a neighbor and new friend of ours, told her about us and our recent loss. The birth mom agreed to allow us to consider adopting her baby. The other resident then called the hospital social worker, who told him that private adoptions were legal in West Virginia and that we could, indeed, adopt the little baby girl waiting in the hospital nursery if we and the birth mom both agreed. The biological mother had already placed another child, a boy, a couple of years earlier and she suggested that the same lawyer handle the adoption of her baby daughter. The hospital social worker called the lawyer, who spoke to the birth mom and then he began to draw up the necessary paperwork. It was at that point that the resident who’d delivered the baby thought to call us to ask if we wanted to adopt!

After a shocked but very short conversation, Marden and I agreed that we wanted to adopt this stunning and unexpected gift of a beautiful child that God had provided. We called our friend back and gave him the news. He then relayed our answer to the baby’s birth mother and the social worker, who contacted the lawyer. In what seemed like a dream, we sat out the waiting period of 76 hours, both of us swinging back and forth from giddy excitement to frantic fear that the baby’s biological mother would change her mind. We spent the rest of that Sunday afternoon bringing the contents of the nursery down from the attic, putting the crib back together and decorating the walls with the cute decorations we’d taken down just three months before, thinking we might never unpack them again. We talked for hours, trying to grasp the amazing turn of events, picking a name for our soon-to-be new daughter and making plans. For the first time in three months, I felt hope again.

At the end of the waiting period, Amy’s (we’d decided on Amy Marie for her name) biological mom signed the paperwork to allow us to adopt her. An hour later the lawyer and his wife knocked on our door, a tiny bundle wrapped up in layers of warm blankets in his wife’s arms. They stepped inside and she handed the baby to me. I sat down on the couch and began to unwrap the layers of blankets, feeling as though I was opening the greatest gift I’d ever received. Finally, I found myself looking down at my tiny, perfect little girl sleeping peacefully on my lap, a halo of blond ringlets surrounding her head. God had answered my prayers in a way I could never have imagined. He’d taken a tragedy and filled in the empty hole it had left in my heart with a beautiful gift, born on the same day that Beth had been due. The ‘coincidences’ of it all were simply too great to be ignored. That we’d ended up in Clarksburg, to begin with, when Marden might have matched at any of the other four residency programs he’d applied to, was the first ‘coincidence’. That our friend and neighbor happened to be the resident handling the ER that day was the second. That Amy had been born on Beth’s due date was the third. Lastly, that everything worked out so seamlessly regarding the lawyer and the necessary paperwork, was the final blessing. Only a complete cynic would be able to ignore the clear and undeniable way that God’s hand had been at work in all of it for months, leading us toward that wonderful day. A devastating loss followed by a blessed gift – love lost and found.