The Memory of My Baby

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I've gotten some questions from those around me in the past few week about my baby.  I figure I'd address some of them because A. you must of somewhat cared to ask to begin with to ask, B. you know someone going thought something similar, C. you yourself are currently going through this.

Do they know what happened to your baby?

Yes and no.  Due to the way it appeared on the ultrasound the baby got labeled as having chromosomal abnormalities.  Meaning it could have been a bad egg, or a bad sperm, or something that went wrong after they combined.  The way I try to explain it is the cells in the embryo split over and over again to copy one another.  One of those splits didn't go so well and the chromosomes were copied wrong.  Maybe something was missing, maybe something flipped around.  Then all those cells were copies over and over until it became a big enough error.  My baby had a heart and it started beating.  But maybe the error was in its brain or another major organ.  It is then decided for the baby to die rather than continue with these major problems.  My body did not kill the baby, nor did the doctors.  In fact my body kept trying to feed the baby long after the heart stopped.  I'm not sure this is an 100% accurate representation of how chromosomal abnormalities work.  About 15% of pregnancies result in miscarriage (in my age group of late 20's), and 60-70% of those are chromosomal abnormalities.  Which means I had about an 8% chance of this happening.  It's not rare.

I do not know where the error occurred.  After the D&C I could have allowed my baby to go through testing.  My RE does not do this on first time miscarriages and I would have requested not to have it done anyways.

Will it happen again?

Possibly.  I have about the same statistics as the first time.  

Boy or girl?  Did you name it?

Again I requested my baby not to be tested.  Bean & I decided it was a boy, and that was it.  I didn't want the extra testing done to confirming ether way.

We did not name it.  That just seems too painful.

Did you bring the baby home?  If not, where does it go?

I did not request to bring my baby home.  I'm not even sure if I was legally allowed to where I live.  And what to do with his body.  Bury it?  It would have been so small.  My baby was marked as "medical waste".  In short he was thrown out.  It sounds so harsh but in most cases this is how it ends up.  

Complete tangent: Years ago I had a sick ferret that required a certain surgery.  I paid over $1000 for the surgery and everything that went along with it.  He was nursed back to health.  A few months later something went wrong and he required the same surgery, another $1000 but he was much more sick this time so chances of survival were much smaller.  I knew he wasn't going to make it.  It's not that I'm not optimistic, it is that I can feel things.  Something I've been able to do ever since I was young, I can feel when my pets are not feeling OK, ether emotionally or physically sick.  I've had many cases, even with fish, that I have said something isn't right and got strange looks.  Only to find out a day later it passed away.  Maybe I'm psychic, maybe I just spend too much time looking at them, at their eyes.  Anyways back to the ferret.  I was given a couple options.  I could come up with the money to pay the $1000+ bill or sign up for their credit cards.  Not that I didn't have the money, but it deem fit spending it for little odds.  They didn't give me the option to put him down, which I wanted.  Or I could give over all rights I had to Sammy, custody pretty much.  He would go along to have the surgery, and if he survived he would be placed for adopting and go to another family.  However, never back to me since I was marked as "unfit".  One of the hardest things I've had to do was signing the paperwork to give him away.  I just abandoned him there.  I didn't tell anyone for months what I had done out of embarrassment.  

I feel the same way now.  Yes, I abandoned him.  But honestly that was really the only thing to be done.  It is too late to change that now.

Memorial service?  Or other ways to remember?

I didn't have a memorial service.  Everything felt like it happened quick.  I just wanted to move on anyways.  Maybe for his due date in August.  

I'm a lazy photographer that loves to take photos, edit them, upload them online and then do nothing else with them.  I rarely see my own photos printed on paper because I never get around to doing so.  That and I get so picky about how it is printed that it takes about 30 minutes per photo for me to get it right.  I have compromised with my laziness and make photo books on my computer with the digital photos, then send them out to get printed.  These are my physical photo albums.  I make them for certain years (like all the photos from 2011), the pets (once they die), and our vacations.

I'm going to make one of these books for my baby.  All I really have are ultrasound pictures and photos of my pregnancy tests and surgery.  So it is going to be a really short book.  My husband's job sells baby bibs so I'm going to buy one, cut it up, and then sew a cover for the book with it.   

Maybe I'll get a tattoo.  I've been thinking for getting an infertility/cervical cancer related tattoo for some time.  I don't have an tattoos right now.  Not that I'm against them but that I really don't like silly tattoos with no mean.  It would be small and on my side.  

If anyone else has any memorial type ideas, let me know.

-Selbe