I remember at only 3 months feeling like I was carrying him really low, like he was going to fall out. I thought that was odd considering he wasn’t that big and 3 months. The nurse just told me it was probably just because it was my second child and I had been “stretched” the first time around. It turned out I have an incompetent cervix. Definition: During pregnancy, as the baby grows and gets heavier, it presses on the cervix. This pressure may cause the cervix to start to open before the baby is ready to be born. This condition is called incompetent cervix or weakened cervix, and it may lead to a miscarriage or premature delivery. To this day I wish I had been more pushy about it, maybe if I had the doctors could have figured out what it was sooner and I could have gone on bed rest and prevented losing Matthew, but then there is no going back and doing over. So forward I moved. I do look back and have all the confidence in my doctor and his staff. It’s just all the “what ifs” that I went through.
October 25, 2001 I took my son to his school fair and I remember feeling a lot of pressure. I went to the restroom to pee and I was bleeding a little. I finished taking him around the fair, because I wasn’t too worried, I bled my whole pregnancy with T, they believed it was a blood vessel that just kept popping. It was just like spotting and they took a lot of ultrasounds through out my pregnancy to make sure everything was fine. When we got home I laid down and the pressure wouldn’t go away. Short story: called the doctor, dropped my son off at my sister’s, and headed for the hospital. Once there they hooked me up and I didn’t have any contractions so they sent me home. I took a shower and felt something weird down in “that area.” Turned out it was the placenta. Went back to the hospital and that is when everything started. To make a long week short, I ended up going into labor, the meds they gave me to stop the contracts put me into heart failure. They couldn’t do a cerclage (they sew the cervix shut) because there was one section of my cervix that didn’t have enough section to sew. I was in the hospital for a week and when I went into heart failure they kept me in maternity, because they said I would be monitored more closely than if they sent me up to ICU. Matthew was born on the day I hit 26 weeks. He was 1lb 10oz and 13 ¼” long. He was hooked up to the ventilator, but his sats kept dropping and they had to hand vent him. There was bleeding on his brain. It can be a stage 1 to 4 and he was a stage 3. That is when we decided to remove him from the machines. They said they could keep him ventilated until we got T there or any other family member. To me this was just for my husband and me (and T). I wanted T there, but I couldn’t keep Matthew on the ventilator, because in my heart he was suffering and I couldn’t see it go on anymore. So my husband and I decided to disconnect him from all the machines. I will say the NICU was awesome. I held him while they disconnected everything and Matthew past away in my arms.
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