Rev3Highlights: What is the saddest experience you have ever had?

Tuesday, April 02, 2024

What is the saddest experience you have ever had?

Quietly managed my grief by screaming like a wild animal.

What is the saddest experience you have ever had?

I married a wonderful man named Michael in the spring of 1996. It was a first marriage for both of us, and we felt as if we’d been waiting for each other our whole lives.

(Me & Michael in Maui with Lanai in the distance, mid-1990s.)

(On our wedding day)

We’d been trying to conceive, with no luck, since our engagement. In the fall of 1997 I underwent an exploratory laparoscopic surgery where it was discovered I had endometriosis. During the surgery they were able to do a procedure that temporarily opened a short window of fertility. My doctor told us this window would last approximately 3 months, afterwhich I’d most likely become infertile again, so we were thrilled when we conceived just three weeks later. The day before Thanksgiving we discovered I was pregnant, and we were so very thankful. Michael caressed and kissed my belly, and we called this our “miracle baby”.

Everything seemed fine. The morning sickness was bearable, and I wasn’t suffering with other early pregnancy symptoms, but at 13 weeks I had some bad bleeding. Michael rushed home from work while I frantically called my doctor. She said not to come in, and that staying horizontal would be the best thing to prevent a miscarriage. It took three days for the bleeding to stop, so Michael took time off from work to take care of me.

At my next appointment my doctor assured me it was only some minor bleeding and I shouldn’t worry about it. “Nothing to be concerned about” she said. I tried to tell her how much blood there was but she brushed it off. At 16 weeks I had an amnio and ultrasound. We found out we were going to have a boy, and the genetic tests all came back normal. However, because there was so much blood in the amniotic fluid, during the ultrasound the doctor said, “Did you know that you almost lost him?” He checked the attachment to my uterine wall and told us everything seemed “okay now”.

My doctor never followed up on this at our next appointment. When I asked her about it she assured me again that it was just some minor bleeding, nothing to worry about. Years later I would learn I’d had a partial placental abruption which made not just my pregnancy high risk, but was also a risk to my life.

Just a few weeks later, at 20 weeks pregnant, we got what I thought would be the worst news of my life. My husband was diagnosed with stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of lung cancer for non-smokers. I remember my husband’s words reverberating in my brain as we walked down the stairs of the medical building: “I have a malignancy“. And I remember the feeling of my unborn child, my first child, my only son, moving in my womb as the nightmare unfolded before us.

After a few months of unsuccessful chemo and radiation they told us there was nothing more they could do, that we should go home and prepare ourselves. The stress of caring for my dear husband as he endured the chemo was more than I could bear. At 5 months into my pregnancy I weighed four pounds less than before I’d gotten pregnant.

I took care of Michael as best I could, but one night, at six and a half months along I sat down on our bed and my water broke. I knew it was too early. I also began bleeding. I lay awake all night having back labor in the hospital, trying to prepare myself for the c-section in the morning. After Sam was born they let me see him for just a second before placing him on the respirator and putting him inside an incubator. I remember hearing him cry out to me as we looked at each other for that brief moment. It would be the only time I would hear his voice.

His lungs were so undeveloped. Maybe it was the stress Sam and I had both endured throughout the second trimester that added to the difficulty of being born early, I will never know….. Each day my husband and I stood by his incubator stroking his face and arms, holding his tiny hands, and talking to him, telling him how much we loved him and praying that he would live. But Sam lived for only six days.

The morning they came to tell us he was gone I had just awoken from a horrible nightmare of a demon breaking into my house and destroying everything I loved. When I saw the doctor’s face, he didn’t have to say anything. I looked at him and said, “My baby’s gone…” and he nodded.

I slipped into a deep, dark despair, but I had no choice but to go on caring for my dying husband. Three weeks after Sam died, our friends and family had gone back to their lives and families, and I hadn't slept in three days and began to hallucinate. Whenever I tried to fall asleep, I would see the grim reaper coming toward me with his menacing sickle. It felt as if I were holding onto the side of a cliff above a dark and bottomless abyss, and if my fingers were to slip, I would fall into an inescapable pit of insanity. Michael, seeing my condition, sent me home to rest, and my mother met me at our condo. That night I woke screaming several times, seeing images of the hospital, my baby, and my tortured husband’s face, in my persistent dreamscape. Against my wishes, my mother took me to the ER where they checked to make sure the crushing pain in my chest wasn’t a heart attack — it wasn’t — and gave me something to help me sleep. In two days my husband would come home for the last time.

Those last few weeks were harsh, but they were also filled with love & intimate conversations. The night before he died we reminisced about all the trips we’d taken, and about how we’d met. We held each other and cried a lot, and spoke of how much we would miss each other. He made me promise that I would get married again, that I would try to have a happy life, and because he knew it meant so much to me, that I would try to have children. Then we put on our wedding rings and held hands, and he said, “Never forget… I love you, forever.“

And the next day, six weeks after our baby died, we were alone in a hospital room. I was holding Michael’s hand, telling him how much I loved him, and thanking him for loving me. Our eyes were locked together till the end. And as I watched him take his last breath, it looked like he exhaled steam, or some kind of strange mist. And then, that was it — he was gone.

I was 37 years old when I lost my family, and I knew with my history of infertility my chances of having another baby were slim at best. I lost my faith completely, and my heart vacillated between indifference and a seething hatred for God and life. Everywhere I went I saw pregnant women, smiling and happy, oblivious to what had happened in my world. Friends didn’t invite me to baby showers, and people kept making well-meaning but in my opinion, ridiculous remarks to me; “You know Jesus needed Michael and Sam more than you did”, “God measures us for a cross before we’re born”, and my favorite “You know right now they’re running through fields of clover”. Clover? Really? Are they running in circles, figure eights, a Möbius strip perhaps, or just one continuous line that goes for an eternity? I was so bitter and hopeless, and it was a dark, cold winter that year.

Seven months later I put my profile on an online dating website. I didn’t feel ready to date, but I had a promise to keep. I thought it would be a good idea to at least start talking to men, and the internet seemed like a good buffer between me and the real world for the time being. I met a lot of men online, and things didn’t fall into place immediately, but I did end up meeting another soulmate. Rusty had lost his wife two months after my husband Michael had died. He was sensitive, intelligent, interesting, worked at NASA (he’s now a NASA Flight Director!), a commander in the Navy Reserves, and most importantly, my best friend. He could relate to my loss in a way no one else could. Four years after both our spouses had died, we were married in Maui.

I was determined, but not overly optimistic about getting pregnant at the ripe old age of 42. We’d been to a fertility specialist at Stanford Hospital and she’d told us with my history of infertility, our chances of conceiving a child were, in her words, “not good.” Still, she said she’d do whatever she could to help us. And then, a miracle happened…

Two months after that appointment, one-month after our wedding, and ten days before my scheduled laparoscopic surgery, I found out that I was pregnant. With no help from the medical community I had somehow overcome all the odds. Making the call to cancel my surgery and tell the Stanford fertility specialist that I was pregnant was the happiest call of my life. She was thrilled for us. “I don’t get many phone calls like this!” she said.

Now we are the happy, and somewhat tired, mid-life parents of a beautiful girl. She means the world to us, and she’s a miracle to me. And every day I’m thankful I got another chance to be a mother.

(He’s wearing a work T-shirt here, but I still love this photo of us)

Time does heal, and it’s not as painful as it was, but I’ll never forget my first family. And each year on Sam’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, I sit with his picture and remember the way it felt to touch his skin, and the color of his eyes, and his newborn smell. And I pray that some day when my time is over, I’ll finally get to hold him in my arms. Till then I can only hold him in my dreams.