To be honest, most of our time in the hospital looked more like this. Not like our posed pictures where we pasted smiles on our faces. In case some of you were thinking… “Why were they smiling in pictures with Maisie?” I’ll let you in on a secret. I was kind of thinking the same thing. But you know what is weirder than smiling in a picture with your dead baby? Crying in or for a picture. I had to do a lot of things I didn’t want to do after I learned Maisie’s heart stopped beating. I didn’t ever want to have to take pictures with my child who was no longer alive, but I had to because I never got a picture with her when she was alive outside the womb. So I knew it would be important to have pictures with Maisie with smiles on our faces. Of course we were sad. Sad beyond belief. But for the sake of memories, which is what we are left with, we bucked up and smiled for pictures with our beautiful baby girl. We masked our pain for the time being, because we didn’t have time to wait for the pain to pass. In the grand scheme of things we had basically no time with Maisie. So we had to make do with the time we had. But you can bet your butt we used up all the tears we had in that time, and much more.
#maisiemarthaofsthun #stillbirth #stillbirthbreakthesilence #stillborn #stillbornstillloved #stillbirthawareness #stillbornawareness #stillamama #stillbirthsupport #pregnancyloss #umbilicalcordaccident #stillbornbutstillborn #bornstill #lifeafterstillbirth
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Survival
Part of what makes this so hard is I heard Maisie’s heart beating at my 28 week appt. on Friday, December 4th, 2020. The same appointment where I also had to chug my glucose drink (during music class before). Everything was fine at this appointment. It was quick and easy… just checking the boxes off the list. I even remarked to my doctor, very proudly, how active my baby was. “Especially when I go to bed!” Who would have known that activity would cease, while she was still in my womb, less than a week later. Shortly after she turned 29 weeks on Wednesday, December 9, she passed away in utero (what day we don’t know exactly, possibly the 10th). I didn’t go in to get checked out until Sunday, December 13 after a few days of worrying, but convincing myself baby was just having some lazy days, or moved to a position I couldn’t feel. I mean, what could have been wrong? I didn’t realize it was a possibility for a baby to die when everything was perfect leading up to that point. Maisie was born 2 days before I would have been 30 weeks. And here is the thing: a baby born between 28-31 weeks has a 90-95% chance of survival. At 29 weeks pregnant, your baby weighs 2½ to 3 pounds and measures 15½ to 16 inches long. Maisie was 2lbs (yes, I have small babies) and 15½ inches. Maisie was perfect. She was tracking just as big as she should have been. But my super active Maisie somehow managed to wind her umbilical cord so tight (torsion) that it occluded, therefore cutting off her oxygen and lifeline. Maisie had an accident and died in the place I thought she was the safest in the world. And what if… what if we could have seen her umbilical cord had too many twists before it was too late? What if we had the possibility to deliver her and give her a chance at life? What if this was something they monitored more closely? I don’t care if it only happens in 5%-30% of stillbirths (which happen 1/160 births). If we can SAVE any single one of those babes, we SHOULD! Tuesday, December 15th, 2020
We spent this day at the hospital so we could continue to get time with Maisie. Apparently you can get out of dodge pretty quickly when you don’t have a C-Section. We didn’t do much this day. We simply took the little time we had to be together. But it was so wonderful to continue to just have that time where it was still only me, Ryan, and Maisie. We ended up needing to switch rooms mid-morning because all the labor rooms were full and someone else had just come in. So we transferred over to a post-partum room and spent the rest of the time there. It was good that we moved because the showers in the post-partum rooms are better than the giant birthing bath showers in the labor & delivery rooms. So, Ryan and I got cleaned up and took some more pictures with Maisie. One of Maisie’s eyes opened after I showered, which I was happy to see. I wanted to see her eye. It felt weird before thinking I would never see her open her eyes. Another small blessing. Overall though, even just after one night we started to see Maisie’s appearance diminish. Her earthly body… I should have captured her face more the previous evening! But I didn’t know… We were happy to have our great nurse Kim back from the first night. After Ryan and I got cleaned up, Kim got Maisie ready for her bath. It was kind of sad (the bath)… but it felt good to know we got to get her washed up a bit. Maisie’s skin had started to peel in places, so she felt so delicate, fragile, and had to be handled with care. In hindsight I wish I would have spent more time examining all of her body, but I was protective of her and wanted to keep her wrapped up in her cozy blankets so nothing else could disturb her body. Kim handled her with such care and we were grateful for her expertise. After Maisie’s bath we got some cute, classic baby photos. Pictures of her little butt up in the air, pictures of her feet, pictures of her having some tummy time, pictures of us holding her hands. We are so thankful Kim had some of these ideas up her sleeve. Another thing Covid prevented us from getting to do was being allowed a photographer. There are places that donate photography services in these situations. So we missed out. Luckily my phone camera is top notch and we still got a lot of great photos, but I cant help to feel we missed out on some other poses, or more pictures of her when she was in her prime. Things we didn’t know to do and didn’t think to do in the moment that someone who had the experience would have suggested. People told me to take a lot of photos. I did. I even took some selfies with her. And if you’re wondering, yes it did feel weird to smile and take photos with Maisie. We were distraught. But it felt even weirder to take pictures of us crying with her. Who poses for a picture crying? Besides for our memories we wanted to capture happiness too. The funeral home offered free transportation between the hours of 9am-4pm. So wanting to avoid an additional $300 charge, we asked if they could come as late as possible. Mackenzie was kind enough to give us all the way to 4pm before she came to take Maisie away. We laid her in a sweet box, all bundled up. Ryan and I were dreading the moment we had to send her away, but when time came it wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be. That is actually kind of a theme I noticed looking back on everything. We got through it all without each step being as difficult as we imagined. God’s peace guarded our hearts and minds through each step of the process. We also knew that right now we were still just saying goodbye until tomorrow, when we would bring our family to the funeral home to meet Maisie. With all of our belongings packed onto a cart, we proceeded down to the doors. We were leaving the hospital, going home without our baby. We got home. Lachlan hugged and held me so tight. He kept kissing me. I could tell he missed me, but he also had a sense something else was wrong. My mom and Maddie were there. Isla too obviously. The doorbell rang, and we were surprised & blessed to find our friend Heather quickly dropping off food, snacks, flowers, and magazines. I don’t really remember much of what else happened that evening. We got all our stuff in, and fell back into the roll of parents. #maisiemarthaofsthun Published 1/15/2021 Monday, December 14th, 2020
This day was long. It has a lot of little details. Some I feel might be missing because they are already forgotten, but the most important pieces are still remembered. We started after a night of very little, if any, sleep. At 7:30am my new nurse, Debi, and new midwife, Katelyn, came in. I think my balloon was evaluated first, apparently worked decently, and then was removed so we could start the next steps. My IV line had already been put into my arm sometime last night. So we were ready to hook me up to the Pitocin (a natural hormone that causes the uterus to contract used to induce labor). It started working relatively quickly and so the contractions did as well, mild at first and growing in intensity as the day went on. Every 30 minutes my nurse would come in and up my Pitocin to the next level. I’d already had some blood drawn the previous evening too so they could look at that to see if there were any issues that would have caused this heartbreak. Of course, at this point we still had no clue in the world what happened to our sweet baby. Throughout the day we had to consider and make crazy decisions like “Did we want to do an autopsy?” or “Did we want to do chromosomal testing?” Nothing we felt we could fully decide until we actually saw baby . We hoped to have some easy answers right away. I knew, of course, that I would yearn for answers and if we didn’t get them or try to get them, how would that impact the grieving process? But I hated what the autopsy would include… having our baby go across town to the U of M, with know knows who, having her body go through the process of being examined, and all without the guarantee we would even get an answer. I prayed we would get the closure we needed. Other things we had to consider throughout the day… Which funeral home to use? Burial or cremation? Funeral or no funeral? Where to bury baby? We were not prepared for any of that. Luckily the nurses had a great relationship and trust with Mackenzie of McBride Funeral Homes in Norwood Young America. We trusted their recommendation and knew that was the route we would choose. I didn’t want to burn my baby. So I knew we were going to do a funeral and a burial. But where the heck are we supposed to find a burial plot? FYI – cemeteries don’t have the most up to date websites making them easy to find and/or contact. All of these decisions were swirling through Ryan’s and my brain all the while I was in labor to deliver a baby who I didn’t get to take home. I prayed I would be able to deliver this baby without complication. I prayed nothing would go wrong because I was still a mom to 2 children at home. I prayed I would get to complete this vaginal delivery, something I mourned never getting to experience (and I never thought I would get the chance to, since I was supposed to have a 3rdC-section). These prayers were answered. Sometime around 2pm they broke my water. For some reason, it was excruciatingly painful. I tried breathing the nitrous oxide, but it did little to relieve the discomfort. I started sobbing once it was complete, not only because it was very uncomfortable, but because I was SO SAD! Everything hit me again like a ton of bricks in that moment. “I’m sorry,” I apologized to Katelyn, “It wasn’t that bad, I’m just crying because this is so sad.” After my water was broken, my contractions became next level. I couldn’t recover after that. My nurse kept suggesting the epidural and I kept delaying. Finally I gave in. I was trying to delay as long as I could manage because in the past my epidurals wore off after 2 hours or so… and I was hoping to make that 2 hours last to the point I needed it the most. Once the anesthesiologist arrived, we were able to get my epidural going between contractions. I didn’t know right away, but I just received the best epidural of my life that would work so well right up to and past birth of baby. This was another answered prayer, as I had prayed “Please let this epidural work so I can continue this process without the physical pain.” I got to rest and relax for 2 hours in no pain at all, as my contractions did what they needed to do. Around 4pm I had dilated all the way to a 10! The first time I ever accomplished that in 3 births! So… it was time. Baby’s head was in position and it was time to learn how to push, which was something else I never got to experience. My midwife said it might take a bit to figure out how to push exactly, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. Earlier we asked the midwife to announce the gender to us after baby was born. This whole time, keep in mind, we still didn’t know if baby was a boy or girl! 4:21pm – “Good job mama. It’s a girl!” This next moment was single-handedly the worst moment of my entire life. I don’t think I can properly explain to you what it feels like to see your lifeless baby born. Her body was so completely still. There were no muscles moving little limbs or even keeping her body taut, there was just a lax body. Her mouth was gaping open… and worst of all, there was no cry coming from this mouth. She had a little cone head from delivery, one that wouldn’t resolve itself after hours, or days. Her stomach was all bruised. Her face and head seemed bruised. Her eyes were stuck shut. In all bluntness, it was not a pretty sight. It was traumatic. I held her. I cried. I kept repeating, “Oh baby. Poor baby. Poor, poor baby. What happened? What happened to you? I’m so sorry!” Ryan held her. He cried. After holding her for a while immediately after birth we were ready for her to go get examined. They weighed her and measured her. 2lbs and 15.5 inches, pretty much exactly what a 29-week-old baby would be. They took her into another room to take a graft off her thigh in case we were going to do chromosome testing. But when my midwife came back, Katelyn said, “I think we have an answer. Her cord was wound so tightly it looks like it occluded by her belly button cutting off her oxygen and nutrients.” So our perfect baby had an accident. An accident inside the one place I thought she was perfectly safe, the place she wasthe safest in life. How could this happen? Who knew this could happen? Poor little stinker seemed to have always turned one direction… never the other. That’s what I imagine. She only turned left… but couldn’t she have just turned right every now and then to unwind her cord? I was relieved in a way to know that we didn’t create a baby who had something wrong. But it didn’t change the fact that my baby was dead. Baby girl came back dressed in a white hat with a little pink star, a cute little button up shirt with pink and green dots, and some little embroidered flowers, and she had the tiniest little diaper on – one with a safety pin! Then they took her footprints. So many footprints. We noticed right away when admiring her hands and feet that she had the longest feet you could imagine! This is a special memory we will always have. Then we held her again. And now I could see past the death and I saw my beautiful, amazing baby girl. I saw she looked just like her brother and sister. I know those long feet she had were from her mama. She had little wisps of blond hair like her dada. She would have had those chunky cheeks my other babies had. She was a complete and full baby and had she been born this early she would have survived. She was adorable. We got some pictures with her. We kissed her. I touched her lips, lips that I ached to nurse. I touched her little toothless gums. I held her hands. After this we had to decide on her name still. We had 2 names picked out for if we had a girl… a first pick and a backup. Which one would we use? We still chose our favorite. Maisie Martha Ofsthun. To be honest I struggled a bit giving her this name at first. I love this name. It was my favorite and it is so cute. But in this moment it seemed I was maybe wasting the name? What if we had another girl and I would miss this name? But… what if we didn’t and I held on to this name for no reason. It was the name we were preparing for if we had a girl… it belonged to our Maisie. Of course it was the right decision and I have no regrets. As for her middle name, Martha was my grandma’s name (on my mom’s side). All of our children have the middle name of a grandparent/great-grandparent. Meanwhile, during all of this we were still waiting for my placenta to come out. Placentas aren’t as ready to detach and come out at 30 weeks… so it was taking a while. We started to reach the end of the 4-hour time frame they were allowing for it to come out on its own. So it was time to intervene with the last option. The doctor was going to have to come in and get up in there to get it out. So I got another hit to my epidural and my bottom half was completely gone again. Good considering what was supposed to happen next. But right after the dose, my placenta decided to come out! Praise the Lord – my final prayer was answered. Then my blood pressure started dropping. Three different times I became nauseous and kind of out of it. I got dosed with medicine to bring it back up… but it got weird there for a little bit. Nevertheless, we got through. My next nurse, Ashlea, came in for the overnight shift. She had picked out some clothes for Maisie. An adorable little gown for her to put on tomorrow after we gave her a bath. And an outfit for burial, a dress made from a donated wedding dress created for little angel babies, along with a hat and blanket. It was precious. Then we finally tucked ourselves in for bed for the night… with a “sleeping” baby by our side. |
AuthorMother. Jesus Lover. Mourner of my stillborn Maisie Martha Ofsthun. Archives
October 2021
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