Due Date

My due date should have been Friday of this week. The closer it gets, the worse I get, and the more it seems unfair. All the moms with babies don't even know how lucky they are. How it could have been them. 1 in 140 pregnancies result in stillbirth. (Globe and Mail article statistic).

When you first get pregnant, the doctors tell you "congratulations, but you need to be aware of how often miscarriages happen" but then the risk of miscarriage ends. you relax. You start to plan the rest of your life. You hear about SIDS and how to prevent it, what lowers the risk etc. But no one tells you, that in that 3rd trimester everything can go wrong. That one day, for no apparent reason, they discover your baby has no heartbeat. In my case it was less than 24 hours after I heard his heartbeat,

The morning before Oliver died, I had this moment where I was perfectly happy. It was Friday morning, and David drove me to the doctor for a routine checkup. My blood pressure was good, and the baby's heart beat was strong. It was finally FINALLY starting to be spring. I was 31 weeks along, with less than 10 weeks to go, and as we pulled up at home we discovered that overnight the blossoms in our yard had bloomed. And there was this moment, this perfect moment where everything was wonderful, and perfect and good.

And the thing that was the best about that day, was knowing that this Friday was so close. The (approximate) date that I got to meet the little life that I already felt I knew so well. My baby bear. The bear cub.

And now as this date gets closer and closer, the loss almost feels worse. It feels sharper and more real than it did in the first foggy few days we left the hospital with nothing but a box. At first all I could do was sleep, Then there were a few good weeks. The hormones from the pumping kept dumping pacifying relaxing chemicals into my brain. And I felt like I was really possibly helping.

My goal with pumping was to do it for the 6 weeks that I was told it would take my body to heal, So I pumped for just over 5 weeks and took most of the last week to gradually wean my milk production. As the happy hormones have faded, the world seems to have sharpened a bit. All of a sudden the seconds that I am alone feel emptier, and cold. The times I am distracted seem more like my old life, the life where we didn't have a son. Before.

And now he should almost be here. Friday is the day I should have been looking forward to for what felt like my whole life, and instead I am dreading it. Instead of holding my son in my arms and feeding him and protecting him and singing to him, I am holding his memorial. I am going to look out at all the faces of all the people who would have loved him, who loved him already, and together we will mourn the fact that we will never know him. No one will ever hear his voice, or get to touch his face again, or watch him grow.

On Friday it will be real. He should be here, and instead he is gone.

The freezer

The freezer at my house is full. I have just about 150 ounces if breast milk to donate to the milk bank. If you or someone you know is reading this because you lost a baby I urge you to consider weather or not you could donate.

For those in the US I might have to do some more digging to provide the info but if you are in Canada it is incredibly easy.

We rented the pump from London drugs. It costs $3.50 per day to rent and we have decided to consider that cost our donation to the milk bank.

You do have to have some bloodwork done, but if you are like me one more blood test now is nothing. At least I didn't have to drink the horrible glucose drink first. In Canada, the bloodwork is all free, so I am not sure if you would have to pay in the US.

The best part of donating the milk for me so far is having a schedule. My full breasts are literally what gets me out of bed in the morning. The days that are good it can be an inconvenience to pump every 4 hours, but the days that are impossible, the pumping is keeping me going.

On Friday last week it was one of the hardest days since I came home. We counted how far along Oliver was from Friday, so every week I would look forward to Friday and my email from baby center telling me how much bigger he was. How much more he was doing. That he went from a lemon to a lime. That he could hear and dream.

Last Friday David was at work and I was alone in the house. I couldn't get my mind off of the loss. Sometimes, like now, I can think of Oliver as an incredible gift that we had for as long as we did. But on Friday last week I couldn't shake the feeling like the universe stole my baby from me. The feeling of loss can be overwhelming.

The only think that helps is the pumping. When it is really bad, and the timer goes off on my phone to pump, I think of the mothers whose babies are in the NICU who don't have milk to help them. If I can save one mother from this grief, then all the pumping will be worth it. When I pump sometimes I think of Oliver and how this gift is his, but just as often I think if the baby who would be just about his age, who is fighting to stay alive.

It gives me the power to do something to help. No one could do anything for Oliver to save him, but I can help some other baby. I can do something.

And some days that purpose is all that keeps me going.

Pumping to donate

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was to give information on how to pump in order to donate.
Most of the information that I found was either how to start a supply for a living baby, or how to stop the production. A lot of what I did in the first few days was the opposite of what the "stop production" information said.

Oliver was stillborn on Sunday May 10, and my milk came in overnight on Monday night, about 18 hours after the delivery. My breasts felt incredibly full, but when I went to pump nothing came out the first time. I had tried to hand express just to relieve the pressure in a nice hot shower but that did not help either. David went to the drugstore to rent a hospital grade pump so the first time I tried to pump was Tuesday in the middle of the day, and I got nothing.

Slowly I was getting a few drops, literally not enough to go through the funnel and into the collection bottles. But I knew that there was something in there, and the minimum pump rental was 10 days so I decided to give it all 10.

Then all of a sudden on Thursday I went from 4-5 drops to an ounce of yellow colostrum. I was so excited! That was the first positive feeling I had since losing Oliver, the first moment where thinking of my body didn't make feel totally betrayed.

Over the first week, getting on a pumping schedule was hard. When there is no hungry baby asking for food, it is hard to remember to produce! I tried setting alarms on my phone, but the convenience of the snooze button meant that they were off by hours in no time. Add to that the fact that I mis-read the instructions that said to sanitize the pumps once per day, so I was totally sanitizing each time. (better more than less though!)

As I have continued to pump my supply has gradually increased, but only if I look at my daily yields. The amount from each pumping session has not been as reliable, probably because of the somewhat irregular time intervals as well as other factors like food and temperature of my breasts, which are suddenly extremely sensitive to cold.

A tool that has helped me increase my supply by monitoring the pumping schedule is a baby app called Feed Baby Lite. A warning to those using it, it is a pretty painful reminder at first that you don't have a baby to feed. I turned off all the notifications, but I did enter Oliver's picture and name. I thought it might make me too sad to be reminded to feed him, but instead it is reminding me that I am doing this FOR him. That this gift is his.

For those looking for some advice on frequency and volume, I only have my experience to go on, but I set the app to alert me every 3 hours. My goal was to pump every 3.5 hours, so the 3 hour alert gave me time to make sure my equipment was set up and a show was queued up in the DVD player. The app goes 3 hours from the end of the last pumping, so if you are reminded at noon, start at 1230 and finish around 1 ( I am doing one side then the other all in one session ) the app will remind you again at 4, 3 hours after you finish.

I only pump once in the middle of the night. Once I fell asleep and poured almost an ounce of milk all over the bed, and I have noticed that the morning gives me a better yield anyway if I don't pump a lot overnight.

I hope this post can help give some information to someone who wants to do the same thing I am doing.

If you are reading this and you are not sure you want to pump and donate, I will tell you, it is inconvenient, and can be frustrating and sad. But I sit in bed pumping and think of Oliver, my beautiful baby and how he can help save another baby. I think of mothers whose babies are in the NICU, fighting for their lives and how if I can spare just one of them from going through this it is all worth it.

2 weeks

My Story:

2 weeks ago I went in to the doctor because I knew something was wrong, and discovered that my baby boy who was at 31 weeks gestation, was dead. 

The doctors showed us the ultrasound and where his heart was and that it was no longer beating. 

And I thought my heart would stop too. 

It felt so impossible to believe, less than 24 hours before I had heard a doppler of the baby's heart, beating just fine. He was healthy, normal, perfect. And then he was gone. 

I had no idea that there was a risk he could be stillborn. I thought a baby would be safe unless something happened to him or her. I was so afraid of falling in the shower, or getting in an accident in the car. I had no idea that in an instant he could just be gone. 

It took me 24 hours to induce the labor, and on Mother's day I delivered him, at 12:05 pm. 

I had no idea what he would be like. The nurses told me we could take as much time with him as we needed, and asked if we wanted to hold him. I knew we would need to hold him so we could have some closure, but I didn't know that I would want to. I didn't know that he would be a perfect baby, who just looked like he was sleeping. 

We got to spend a full 24 hours with him at the hospital. We read him a story and sang songs to him. We told him we love him and that we will always love him. 

I got to watch my husband hold his beautiful son for the first and last time, and watch my mother hold her grandson in her arms, just in time to say goodbye. 

I thought it would be the worst day of my life, having to deliver a baby who was already gone, but it wasn't. 

It was not the beautiful and joyful day that it should have been, but there was beauty and joy and sorrow all together. It was certainly the most profound day of my life. The day I became a mother. 

The day I got to see that my baby bear had his daddy's nose and eyes, and my chin and long legs. Feet with normal arches, not high like me or flat like his daddy, but the perfect average. He was perfect. 

The last 2 weeks have been like being in a weird dream. We have received an incredible outpouring of love and support from our friends and family and strangers. I keep waking up expecting to be kicked. Every bite of food that I eat makes me sad because I won't feel him wiggling around as the sugars go through my system. Every place we go makes me hurt, because I can no longer imagine how fun it will be to bring my baby next time. 

Notes about this blog: 

This blog may be disjointed for a while, but I hope it does some good. If you are someone who knows us, who would have known Oliver then I am sorry. I am sorry you won't get to know the magical little life that I knew. If you are here on this site because you have lost a baby of your own then I am sorry in a different way. I feel your pain.

I plan to post about my journey, as well as my incredible husband David's journey because it might help someone going through this to know they are not alone. I also plan to post about my decision to encourage the breast milk that inevitably comes in after delivering any baby. 

Mothers of stillborn babies are typically told how to discourage the milk and stop the supply because for many it is just a constant painful reminder of the baby they no longer have. I felt like the milk belongs to Oliver, and that pumping it and donating it to babies in the NICU was a way for him to connect with the world. Since he will never make friends with a stranger, or go on a date, or get married and have a baby of his own, this was a way he could touch some lives, and bring some good into the world.