Why maddie may be an only child.

If you haven't already discovered C. Jane, please do. She is a mormon mommy blogger, but she is just so eloquent. She is my role model. Her writing has this way of soothing you and inviting her into her life at the same time. I could only ever dream of writing like she does.

Just yesterday she posted about her heart-shaped uterus. I was shocked. Yet another thing I have in common with C. Jane, although, I wish it was something no one ever had to have.

She highlights her miscarriage as a result of her condition. I sat there at my computer desk, just sobbing. I had heard the possibilities of what could happen, the "side effects", of having a heart-shaped uterus, but I have never had to face them. We were lucky. So lucky.

When Maddie was born, the doctors told me that I had the most severe case of bicornuate (heart-shaped) uterus they had ever seen. The odds that maddie had grown correctly with no complications were slim. very slim.

So I went home, grateful for my amazing blessing and tried not to think about it. Which has been easy to do. Babies have this habit of taking up your time so that you don't even want to consider having any more kids. Not that I don't love her, and all babies, really. But when you're sleep deprived, you only want to think about whatever will get you more sleep, not less.

Now that we're quickly approaching maddie's 1st birthday, people are starting to ask "when is maddie going to become a sister?". I don't blame them necessarily. If I were normal, the answer would simply be "as soon as I'm in my last year of grad school." But I'm not normal. and the answer isn't so simple.

How do I explain without horrifying them that another pregnancy puts me and my baby at risk of dying? How do I gently tell someone that I don't have the strength to have a miscarriage? How do I explain that maddie was nothing short of a miracle, and even then it took us a year plus to conceive her?

And there it was. C. Jane's blog. A story about someone who hadn't been so lucky. A baby who never received a spirit. I couldn't do it. Not emotionally, not physically.

So here I am, facing facts. My condition isn't just some medical term any more, and my side-effects aren't just an after-thought.

I, Amber, who dreamed of having six kids, may only just have the one.


Maybe one day we'll be able to adopt, although it's a complicated process that doesn't tend to favor parents who already have children.

But for now, it's just the one. And you know what? We've really come to peace with that. For now, our family feels whole. Goodness knows, she keeps us plenty busy. And we're blessed. So blessed.

I am continuously convinced there is a divine reason maddie is here with us today. The odds were stacked against us, against her, and yet she is with us, continually changing us into better people. Whenever I am tempted to wish that we had waited to have maddie until later in our lives, until after graduate school, a voice in my head whispers to me that there is a reason for her timing.

Time keeps on tickin'...

Madison turned 6 months old today. Can you believe it? I sure couldn't. To celebrate, we fed her desert with dinner - mashed up blackberries. She LOVED it and threw a fit once she was done.

On a more serious note, her half-birthday made me reflect on her birth. I went searching through old pictures and found this one, and my heart stopped: 

This was in the middle of the night, after everything had settled down. As you can tell from my swollen eyelids (no, that's not makeup), and my bloated lips, I felt like I had been beaten up. Madison had been separated from me all day, and once we were finally reunited, I insisted that she sleep on my chest with me.

We were two beaten up gals.

Compare that to today, and we have both come a long way.

Since her birth, I've been determined to take back control of my body and rebuild my strength. Not that working out would have or will prevent another c-section, but I just felt so weak after her birth, I needed to prove my strength to myself.

So in a lot of ways, her 6 month birthday was just as much of a milestone for myself. This morning, I went jogging while pushing maddie in the stroller like always. But this time I ran farther than I have since high school. It was liberating. I finally felt strong again.

Hopefully I can keep this up... who knows what I (or she) will accomplish by her 1st birthday?

A [not so] perfect birth story

A lot of friends and family have had questions about exactly what happened during Madison's birth, so here it goes.

As many as you know, Jeff and I both really admire natural births. We sought out midwives because we wanted to avoid any unnecessary medical interventions.

Our first family photo

Of course, Madison went breech, forcing us to have a c-section. Before the c-section began, doctors did an OR procedure where they pushed on my belly from the outside to try and forcibly move her. The procedure failed and the c-section began. 

So, having to give up our hopes of a beautiful, natural childbirth, we continued with the c-section. The c-section went well, without any complications, and Madison was born with no complications. Of course, I couldn't hold madison after she was born, so I couldn't stop yelling at Jeff to "get back here with my baby!" 

I couldn't hold madison after the c-section,
 so Jeff held her to my face so I could kiss her

Fast Forward two hours after the c-section was over, and I finally was able to hold madison for the first time. Right as Jeff handed her to me, I felt a rush of blood draining from my face, and I started shivering. The nurse checked me, and her face turned to panic. She told me that bleeding was normal after giving birth, but I was hemorrhaging blood. 

She stepped out into the hall to call in my OB. When she came back to check me, she found baseball-sized clots that I had passed. The entire time, I was blissfully unaware of the seriousness of the situation because I was finally holding my baby. Poor Jeff was freaking out, and he finally convinced me to let the nurses take her back to the nursery when my blood pressure dropped to 90/40. 

My first time holding madison,
right as I began hemorrhaging.

I finally realized the seriousness of the situation when my doctor arrived. He had left another patient who was in the middle of delivering her baby to come check on me. When his face looked even more worried than the nurses, I started to panic a little.

At this point, I had lost 4 liters of blood - and there are only about 5.5 liters in the human body. The doctor told us that they had no idea where the bleeding was coming from, or how they would stop it. Jeff and I both started to panic, and maybe we were being naive, but we both took a few minutes to tell each other how much we loved each other. Just in case.

They rushed me back into the OR, thinking they would need to re-open my incision. Before that, they reached into my uterus and scraped out the clots. Jeff watched everything and said they pulled out clots the size of grapefruits. 

Luckily, they were able to get the bleeding under control. Unfortunately, it was at this point that they had to give me Pitocin to continue to stop the bleeding. For those of you who don't know, pitocin is a medicine given to women to induce labor. 

So at this point, after 3 OR procedures in 5 hours, and after having already having a baby, I started to go into labor. The contractions were worse than anything I could imagine. Normal contractions are painful, but  contractions on a uterus that has been cut into and stitched up and extremely inflamed are... unbelievable. 

I don't remember much after that, but Jeff stayed up all night watching me, and he said that I would wake up every 5 minutes from having a contraction in pain, and the instant it ended I would pass out. 

Recovery has been hard, but so worth it! And Jeff and I have just been appreciating every moment together. My midwives even said that had Jeff and I attempted to have a home birth, I wouldn't have even made it to the hospital before passing away. Thank goodness Madison was a breech baby, it saved my life. Everything happens for a reason, and God answered our prayers. 

PS - Madison has been such an easy baby that it (almost) makes up for everything we went through. I Love my little family so much.