My World Turned Upside Down

On a Saturday morning, I still had not felt my baby's kicks yet.  I knew I had an anterior placenta and hearing the heart rate was never easy but I just wanted to check in because the last two days I felt different.  I felt like I lost weight.  I felt like I just wasn't pregnant anymore.  I was able to easily put on a Halloween costume the night before which should have made me look more round but it didn't.  So as my husband put the kids in the car and took them to their soccer games and I was a few minutes behind in my minivan with my 10 month old, Sara Beth, already in her car seat waiting for me, I pulled out the handheld Doppler to listen for my baby's heart rate...

Back in late July 2012, I got a positive pregnancy test!!  Most mothers would be ecstatic but I was less than that.  I was scared.  Here I was sick with an unknown illness later to be determined to be related to the mold found in my home that I swept up one Labor Day weekend 2011 and breathed in tiny mold spores that became my toxic illness leading to pain, neurological and vision changes, etc...  I knew I was "fertile" because I chart my cycles but 2AM happened ;) and here I was... pregnant with #6!

...so on that morning, I failed to find the heart rate.  I knew immediately that baby was gone.  I didn't want to believe it.  I got into the car and drove to the soccer fields.  Outside of the fields in the parking lot, I ran into another fellow Catholic minivan mom of many who also had experienced miscarriage in the past (I lost Baby Groves 4 in January 2011).  She asked me if everything was OK.  I shook my head "no" and we clutched each other in a strong embrace and cried as I told her that I couldn't find my baby's heartbeat.  My husband still didn't know.

I sat through the soccer games of my children and told a friend who was also a nurse and was also pregnant at the same time as me and due at the same time I was.  She said to come to her house after and she'd try to find his heart rate with her Doppler.  After the games were done I told Austin the plan and we went over to her house.  The kids oblivious to anything played with their close friends while we tried again.  Unfortunately, there still was no sound.... boom, boom, boom, boom.  Nothing.

Austin and I got into the car and drove to Sinai where my hospital team awaited our arrival and they too got out the Doppler to try to hear and heard nothing though I told them they wouldn't hear anything and that I was ready to see my baby on ultrasound...now.  They wheeled in the machine and a student doctor put the wand on my belly with the necessary amount of goo and there my baby was... still.  No movement.  No heartbeat.  Silence fell over us all.... then tears.

My baby had been dead for a week they guessed.  I waited for spontaneous labor to come but it never came and I decided to push things along 9 days later and at 17 weeks of pregnancy I gave birth to a baby boy, Christopher Gabriel Groves, November 5, 2012 at home.  We interred him with the remains of my previously miscarries baby months later in a Catholic cemetery in Maryland.

Video of my pregnancy and birth of Gabriel