stumblingtoholiness

It is a strange thing to find out in the same breath that you are pregnant and your baby has to die.

I didn’t know I was pregnant. I shouldn’t have been pregnant. It was the wrong timing for everything, biologically speaking.

Emotionally speaking, and according to circumstance, it was also the wrong time. I have 5 children. We are going through some big changes in our family. And I’m tired. I didn’t really want another child right now, though we have always tried to be of the mind set that man plans his way but God directs his steps.

And God did indeed direct our steps. Since Friday I had been having excruciating lower abdominal/pelvic pain. It would come and go. I thought I was having digestive issues. The pain was uncommon for me but I don’t usually have digestive issues that involve any sort of pain so I wouldn’t have known how severe it was compared to normal pain associated with them. I thought I was being a bit of a baby. Nevertheless, I was in bed all morning Saturday and all day Sunday.

Monday morning I was feeling better though tender still. I had to call our family doctor for ztwinone who was having a bad reaction to a tick bite. We went to the doctors that afternoon, by which time I was not doing so well again so I spoke to her about my pain too. She wanted me to have an ultrasound as soon as possible.

To skip the rest of the play by play, I ended up driving to the local emergency room Tuesday. They took blood and urine samples. They did the ultrasound. I was pregnant but there was no baby in my womb and there was blood outside it.

Everyone was shocked. Ectopic pregnancy is not common and this one was strange even in that category. After the laparoscopy they told us the egg had burst from an ovary on one side, been fertilized and migrated to the opening of the Fallopian tube on the other and implanted there. It had ruptured the tube a bit and that is where the blood was coming from. They removed the very very young “tissue” and amazingly were able to repair the relatively minor damage and not have to remove anything. Ovaries, Fallopian tubes, uterus, all still completely intact.

I am a jumble of emotions right now, though strangely peaceful. I have not had anxiety or fear through any of this. I went to the hospital, to the ultrasound and into surgery alone, without zmr who had already left for work that day. He came as soon as he could but didn’t get there until I was already in surgery. But I was not lonely. I used the quiet time to pray for a girl in our church who had just undergone major surgery, the recovery which was and is causing her pain like I have never known.

Really though, I was not alone. He who keeps me and does not slumber was watching over and orchestrating every moment. My mother in law came totally unexpectedly. If she had not come I wouldn’t have gone to the hospital. I have 5 children to care for, I can’t be frivolously going to the ER. It was the tick bite that prompted her to come. I rarely go to this hospital, my doctor has a private practice in another direction. But I went this time.

My pastor’s wife is a doctor affiliated with this hospital and they both came to pray with me before the surgery. A fellow church member who is a nurse assisted the surgery and I’m sure he was praying through it too. The anesthesiologist was someone whom I had met last summer through this same nurse when all three of our families hiked Mt Monadnock together. Even the doctor performing the procedure was an individual who, though I had not met her, had heard unanimous praise of from many others. Zman even started figuring out how to drink from a sippy cup last week, so I could leave him knowing he would have nourishment.

So many seemingly random occurrences worked together to not only save my life but to offer me the quiet assurance of my Lord that He was there in every moment. He was there with me, and with my baby. No, it didn’t have 10 fingers and 10 toes. I didn’t even know “it” was. But God knew. God formed it, knit it, if not in my womb, in my body and brought a soul into the world and called it back to Him again. I am honored and humbled, privileged and sorrowful, grateful to be alive and for life and I am grieving.

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