The Birth Story

Evidently, amongst my friends, it is the tradition of women to share their birth story. So, who am I, to oppose tradition? (Sing it with me!!!  "Traditiooooooon!!!! Tradition!" And I'm not even Jewish...that I know of :)
I'm sitting here, listening to my sister and my husband laugh at "The Lorax." My thoughts are a jumble from a lack of sleep, feelings of both joy and failure, questions for God that I can't verbalize, and a list of "to-dos" that is a mile long.
My son is just over a week old.
My son. 
A son!
Who would have ever pictured me with a little boy?  I am, after all, the ruffely-jewelry type...I guess I can't exactly put him in sequins (unless I want to raise Johnny Weir...and that's a no, people...although Lord knows I love my figure skaters)...
I'm over here melting at onesies that say things like "Handsome" or "Mommy's Hero."
This really isn't how I pictured it...
It's so much better...
I sent out a Christmas card this year saying that everything in my pregnancy was going great. I had a feeling that I shouldn't have sent that, and turns out, I was right. The cards went in the mail on a Saturday. The following Monday, we found out that my left ventricle was only functioning at 35%. By New Year's Eve, preeclampsia reared its ugly head, and I was admitted to MoBap.
33 days.
That's how long I spent in the hospital...27 of which, was spent percolating.
The medications for my heart gave me migraines; I spent a lot of time in a dark room.
My blood pressure was inconsistent.
Every ultrasound was perfect.
Every echocardiogram showed little-to-no improvement of my heart.
All of my blood work looked great.
Why was I in the hospital, again?
History.
Thank God for Hannah--she saved her little brother's life.
Dr. Michael Paul, MD--He's the genius that kept me in the hospital...the genius who loves life, who loves babies, and who loves mommies who want children, when every other doctor says no...He's the one that God put into my life, and into David's life, who channeled hope that came straight from the Lord. That man lives on a pedestal, and I will forever be grateful to him (He's a perinatologist at MoBap, if you ever need one--he's the one that all of my nurses said they'd send their daughters to, or go to, themselves--THAT says something).
He's the one who, over a year ago, implemented the "master plan" that culminated in my miraculous full-term, 37-week pregnancy.
I stayed pregnant.
Medications for my heart, kept me from pre-term labor (which started around 27 weeks). Prenatal vitamins, folic acid mixed with aspirin, daily shots of blood thinners, and 27 days of bed rest made a recipe for what I hoped would be a complication-free delivery...
We had no idea what we were in for.
My c-section went well...far better than the last time. There was no rush; there was no fear. There was a gentle calm to the delivery that, in spite of my worries about being cut on, was felt by everyone in the room. David was even able to cut the cord this time...
But the next morning, we heard the other part of the story...
This little boy...my flip-flopper, my dancer-ninja...was born with his umbilical cord looped around his neck three times.
The umbilical cord was also tied in a knot.
We couldn't have possibly known.
All of his fetal monitoring was perfect...
He had to be born, that day, at that time, or we would have lost it all...
We would have lost him...
And we would have lost everything.
What we didn't realize, was that how big of an impact my refusal to do one specific test, would have had on him: I refused my amniocentesis. Dr. Paul said it was typical for an amnio to be ordered at this stage, to make sure the baby's lungs were developed. He also informed me of the error rates in the test, and based on that, along with the invasive nature of the test, I very strongly refused. It's the only test I said "no" to (with the exception of the advanced testing for Down's Syndrome). I felt I shouldn't do the test. Wonder of wonders--the amniotic fluid tested at delivery said my son wasn't ready to come out of the womb yet. I would have fallen to a statistic--the fact is, my son's lungs are perfect, and had he not been delivered at 12:32 pm on 1/26/12, he would have died.
Chalk one up to Mother's Intuition--no, scratch that--Chalk one up to the intervention of the Holy Spirit.
When your doctor looks at you with tears in his eyes, and says that your case is one of those that frequently ends up in a stillbirth, your heart breaks in a million pieces for the parents who left that hospital with empty arms--especially when you know the feeling already. Every fear you've had comes snowballing back into your face like a freight train off of the tracks...how close we came...I still can't understand it all, but I know it's by the grace of God, and by the prayers of my friends, my family, my husband, and by the prayers of crazy "drunks" like Hannah in I Samuel (reference to previous blog, if you're confused). Maybe all of the tears and prayer paid off--I certainly believe it.
I've written about how steps are ordered by God...about how God shows that He loves us in the leaves. I've written a lot about loss, about the journey, and about finding my way back home to Him again...about how desperately I need Him, how frequently I fail, and how ferociously He loves me.
When your doctor tells you that your son had an angel on his shoulder, the words you've written--the altars you've made--bow down to the beauty of seeing just how big God is for that one moment in time.
My heart stops every time I think of the look on Dr. Paul's face when he told us how close we came.
We're back home now...
Life is forever changed.
It's not easy...I'm having troubles with milk (TMI, but it's my blog) and with hating myself for my reduction surgery...I can't supply for my son everything that he needs.
I fall short in an area where other mothers have an abundance that they usually don't appreciate. I struggle with feeling like a failure in that aspect.
But you know where I haven't failed? I haven't failed in praying for my son. I haven't failed in laying a foundation for him for life, for survival...his name means "place of fragrance," or "place of worship," and he is. That little boy lives every day as an altar to God, in a way that the Hannahs of this world understand. He is my very own "Boy Who Lived" (HP Reference!!!), and I can't look at him without praising God and inwardly falling to my knees. I also cannot ignore the fact that my history, painful as it was, laid a foundation for his life, and for my different perspective, this time around.
I will never be everything my son needs in this world. Neither will his father. But the one thing we can do, is to point him towards the Lord. We can tell him his birth story...about his own miracle...and we can hopefully let him know that God has a plan for him...that He's had a plan for him since conception...and that he has a mission to fulfill in his time on this earth. We can let him know that we are here for him...we can teach him how we try, how we fail, and how God loves us.  We can raise him to know Who can supply his every heart's desire, like He supplied my heart's desire.
We can show him Jesus with skin on, and we can teach him to be that, to others.

Unfortunately, we can't seem to teach him that daytime is NOT sleepytime...but that's a blog to be written at another time!!!!!!!   :)

The greatest thing we can teach him, after all, is that he is loved...in abundance...daytime or nighttime...by a God Who made the leaves for him to marvel at, by a mother that spent a month in the hospital just to see his face, by a father that would fight a lion in his defense, and by a family that has stuck together through the deepest valleys on the earth...

(For those who have asked, at this point, I am fine. My cardiac function will be tested in about 1-2 months; I'm still on a couple of medications that I'd like to be off of. My blood pressures are too high, but I'm hoping as my weight comes off, that will change. I am hoping for a clean bill of health over the next month or so. Your prayers are appreciated, as between the bed rest, the c-section, and the heart issues, not to mention the new baby, I'm pretty tired. Other than that, I'm elated, and trying not to hover over every sound JD makes! Thank you so much for your continued prayers...we look forward to seeing you as soon as this epic flu season subsides! :)