True heart break

I have finally decided to sit down and start to journal the events of the past year.  I am going to try to recall as best I can the things I have experienced as well as the emotions I have experienced, but since it will likely take me some time, it will take many posts.  I will probably include present experiences as well but hopefully the posts will eventually link together and make sense. 

A year ago I was pregnant for the sixth time.  I had lost two of the previous pregnancies but things seemed to be going well with this one.  At my 16 week Doctor's appointment my Doctor told me that with the strong heartbeat he heard and how well things were progressing I was down to a 1% chance of miscarriage.  One night in October I woke up with an extreme headache, worse than all but one other headache in my life.  It persisted through the weekend and I called the "on call" doctor and was given some pain reliever deemed safe for pregnancy.  The headache continued through the next week and my blood pressure started climbing which was very rare for me.  I visited my OB and while he didn't check the baby he thought everything was still ok I just needed to get the pain under control from the headache and everything else would even out.  He sent me to the Immediate care clinic where they gave me a shot for the pain.  It really didn't work.  I decided just to wait things out until the next week when I had the 20 week ultrasound. 

I was quite concerned as we went in for the ultrasound but didn't dare explore those feelings until the ultrasound tech informed us that there was no longer a heartbeat.  Pregnancy is emotionally and physically difficult for me and shortly after finding out I was pregnant my husband and I decided that this pregnancy need to be my last so we choose for him to have a vasectomy.  So when the ultrasound technician, (and shortly after the Dr) informed us that our baby was dead, we knew this was the end of our childbearing journey.

A few hours later I was admitted into the hospital to deliver our baby.  What an emotional day and night!  When the social worker came in asked if we preferred burial or cremation it brought on a whole new level of grief.  In the past when I lost a baby, there was no resting place, no memorial, just broken dreams and tears.  This time I actually would have a place to mourn the child that was lost to me.