More Difficult News

On Sunday this week, Katrina and I were reading together from a book we have on dealing with loss of a baby and part of what we read was on making a birth plan.  We've done this before with our previous pregnancies, but this was going to be a whole different ball game.  We knew we were going to have the birth in the hospital, so we had to make our birth plan taking that into account.  It was a difficult process, but we got through it.

On Wednesday, Katrina and I visited the Maternal Fetal Medicine department at the hospital in Provo.  Katrina has already been there once before.  I went with Katrina this time for a follow up visit to see how things were coming along.  The first lady who came in, who wasn't the doctor, performed a routine ultrasound and got some basic pictures of the Abigail for us.  Another nurse was in the room to record how Katrina is doing on taking her vitamins.  The first nurse let us know that Abigail was head down.  That confused us a little bit because we knew she's connected to the placenta, so we didn't think it would be possible to be head down.  That was one of the things we had talked about on Sunday that we were worried about, if Abigail didn't go in the head down position, it wasn't likely Katrina would be able to push her out.  But finding out she was head down gave us a lot of hope.

Next came in the doctor.  She is a very nice lady and she was happy to see that I had come along for this appointment.  Last appointment she had stressed to Katrina that none of what is going on with Abigail is Katrina's fault and she pointed to the empty chair and said how she usually told the husband to make sure his wife understood that point, so I wanted to make sure I was there for the next appointment.  She sat down and started doing some more ultrasound work.  Quickly the conversation turned to the birth.  She mentioned how it was good that Abigail's head was down, but with this ultrasound, her previous suspicion was confirmed: Abigail's head was fused with the placenta.  This meant that even if her legs came out during the birth, there was some, but very little chance that the head would follow.  So this meant one thing and that was the best option for us was for Katrina to have a c-section.  This would also give us a slight chance of being able to see and talk to Abigail before she dies.  With a natural birth, there was very little chance Abigail would have been born alive, so we are happy to upgrade from little to slight.  I'm still very scared for the c-section.  I personally know a few people that have had bad experiences and I want to protect my wife from whatever I can.  I know the doctors will do the best that they can.  I'm still scared out of my mind.  We went to my parents house right after so we could spend a few minutes talking to them.  My dad has always been great at listening and then when he could sense I said my peace, he talked to me about other stuff like sports to get my mind off of the c-section.  My mom listened as well and offered to make an angel wing cross stitch for us.

I knew Heavenly Father brought us to Mona for a reason.  The more I think about it, the more I feel like He was bringing us closer to my family so they could help me process this difficulty.