Hey everyone! My name is Lyn and I am here to tell you my story about the loss of my son. This is a parent’s worst nightmare to ever have to live through. I pray my story helps others through difficult times and situations they may go through.
I am happy to talk with anyone who feels they need someone to vent to, talk to or just throw words at. In situations like these we all need help. Not just women, men too. I am truly here for anyone who needs to talk and feel safe and comfortable in doing so.
My story begins in 2002. I was going to the doctor for a routine annual women’s health exam. My doctor said as soon as the results of the tests were back, they would call me. Hard to believe just three days later I would find out I had abnormalities in my cervix tissue samples and would need to do further tests.
It took all of a month to learn about Cervical Cancer and the effects it would forever have on my body. I went from having my cervix swabbed for a routine PAP Smear to a Colposcopy to a LEEP Procedure. The doctor was certain she had got all of the cancerous cells out of my cervix; but the downside was, I would never be able to carry another child to full term.
I chose to keep my womanly parts in the event I did want to try and have another child someday. I had three beautiful daughters, but I still yearned to have a son. Little did I know I would actually get pregnant just two years later.
The pregnancy was horrible. I was so miserable that I just wanted it to be over. The doctor that I had for my pregnancy with my son was not the same one I had for all three of my girls nor during the time I had cancer. It was a man. I was not quite sure how comfortable I was with him, but it turned out he was a really good doctor in his field.
He kept a check on me to make sure that all went well during the pregnancy and that my cervix was holding well. To both of our surprise, my cervix had actually healed very well and had a little more scar tissue than expected. Therefore, my cervix held my son in place better than we had expected. This was a great relief considering we were expecting it to have issues after my second trimester when my son would start to gain weight and put more pressure on my cervix.
When I first got pregnant with my son, I was super excited. His father was initially happy but this faded as we started to have financial issues. Ones I wouldn’t know about until further into my pregnancy. We had one of those “perfect” or “normal” happy family relationships that most people wanted. At least, up until I was about five months pregnant. That is when things started to take a turn for the worse in our relationship.
My boyfriend, (who was the father of my youngest daughter and the son we were about to have), and I had been together solid for six years at this point. Before that, we had dated off and on for almost three years. At about three months pregnant, was when I first learned I was having a boy. I had gotten so sick that I drove myself to the emergency room at the hospital. It took me almost an hour to get there when it should have taken no more than 30 minutes. I had to stop a few times to get sick.
The first ER visit wasn’t so bad. The doctor on duty ran some tests and found I was dehydrated. He put me on an IV drip to get me rehydrated. I asked him to call my boyfriend so that he could arrange to pick up the girls from school as I was not going to make it. I was released later that evening to go home and was given specific orders to come back the next morning if I was not feeling any better. My OB/GYN didn’t feel my stats warranted enough alarm to admit me to the hospital.
I tried to do all of my nightly routine with the girls to get them ready and into bed. They had school the next day and both girls knew I wasn’t feeling well. They went to bed with ease and I laid on the couch in misery. I could barely stand on my own two feet. I couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. I managed to make it through the night and get the girls up, ready for school and to school the next morning before once again driving myself to the emergency room.
The same doctor was there, thankfully. He ran all of the same tests again. Came back to me with a very small cup of room temperature water. One sip and that was all it took. He admitted me to the hospital.
My boyfriend was not happy I was admitted. It cost him some money on an account we had. I was in the hospital for a week. He only brought the girls to see me once in that whole week and they only got to call me once. My oldest daughter came to see me twice and called me every day. When I was finally discharged and able to go home, I had to be on bed rest for a couple of months and then we would check to see if I was doing better or needed to stay on bed rest.
At about the eight-month mark, my boyfriend started getting verbally abusive towards me. I couldn’t understand why he was being this way. He was an alcoholic by textbook terms. He came home one evening while I was working on getting the kitchen cleaned up so I could start dinner. The girls were all in the room playing with their toys and had a movie playing on their TV. My boyfriend was upset with me that I did not have the dishes done when he got home. He took one of the glass bowls and hit me over the head with it. This was the first time he had physically abused me, and it knocked me out. My oldest daughter heard him yelling at me and came out just as he had hit me on the head with the bowl.
He left the house, and I woke up to my oldest daughter trying to clean me up and wake me up. Once I was able to get up, she helped me clean up the blood and helped me to the couch. She kept her sisters in the bedroom occupied while I tended to my head and rested. She finished doing the dishes, picked up the mess from the bowl and threw away any evidence of what had happened so that her sisters wouldn’t see it. Things progressively kept getting worse.
I could hardly eat at any point of my pregnancy. The doctor was concerned as I kept coming to my appointments exhausted, fatigued and irritable. Not once really feeling any better.
Five days before my due date I was scheduled to be induced as I was having more issues with the pregnancy. The doctor stated throughout the pregnancy that it was due to high stress levels at home. He wasn’t wrong, things were bad.
The baby was stressing just as much as I was, and they wanted to monitor him and make sure that he was healthy and still progressing like he should be. I had all three of my girls there at the hospital. A close female friend and my oldest daughter’s grandmother were all there for when I brought Joseph into the world.
Each one of the girls had been at the hospital with me each time one of them had been born; it was only fair all three of them were there for their little brother to be brought into the world. My oldest had to laugh and cry just so the birthing process didn’t make her sick.
After a few hours of being in labor, they gave me an epidural. It wasn’t as good as the one I had had with my middle daughter, but it was good enough to keep most of the contractions from destroying me completely. At around midnight that night, my boyfriend came into the hospital room and started yelling at me. He said I shouldn’t be there being induced. The doctor came in and kicked him out of the hospital. He told him not to come back until he was sobered up. The doctor told me that if I wanted them to, they would call him once our son was born.
I was only about 8cm when the doctor came in to check and see how Joseph and I were doing. When he did an exam, he found that the umbilical cord was wrapped around Joseph’s neck and he needed to get him out immediately.
The doctor stretched my cervix and worked at pulling Joseph out. When he finally got his head out, he immediately unwrapped the umbilical cord from his neck. Joseph was breathing but his heart rate was low and he was way below the normal body temperature that he should have been at. Once Joseph was fully out, they let my friend cut the umbilical cord and immediately put Joseph under a heat lamp.
My friend called my boyfriend after Joseph was born, not before. And where was his father? Passed out drunk on the couch at home. He didn’t come back to the hospital until the next day. But at least he was sober.
I did not get to hold my son for about an hour after he was born so they could make sure he was safe and healthy. This was the scariest and hardest pregnancy I had ever had out of the four children I had given birth to. But we both survived it and left the hospital in good health…
