Steph's Story - Brady

In the middle of May 2007 I started feeling really sick to my stomach.  I didn’t know what was going on, I felt like I might be pregnant but I was still nursing my nine month old daughter and taking the mini pill so I thought that there was no way that I could be pregnant.  I finally decided to take a pregnancy test and it showed up positive very quickly.  I couldn’t believe it.  My baby was still a baby, could I handle another one so soon?

I made an appointment to see my Dr. so we could find out how far along I was.  He scheduled an ultrasound so we could find out.  At the ultrasound we were able to see the little baby.  You could see the arms and legs.  The baby was moving around.  We heard that wonderful sound of the baby’s heartbeating.  We found out that I was ten weeks pregnant and that I was due on January 2^nd.  I continued to be very sick and threw up quite a bit more than my other pregnancies.

I had an appointment four weeks later.  My Dr. couldn’t find a heartbeat.  I was scared and nervous.  My Dr. said that it was still on the early side and since we saw the baby on the ultrasound and heard the heartbeat then, he wasn’t as concerned.  But I was.

We were building a house at the time and the day my oldest daughter was baptized we took my cousins to go and look at it.  We didn’t have back stairs yet and as I jumped out the back door I felt something gush out.  I knew something was wrong.  I told my husband that we needed to go home.  When we got home I called the hospital and they had my Dr. call me.  He told me to lay in bed and to call him if things got worse.  My dad and husband gave me a priesthood blessing which made me feel comforted and at peace with what was going on.  I had a feeling that my baby was gone, but I still had hope.

The bleeding got worse so my Dr. had me go in for another ultrasound.  There we found out that we had lost the baby.  My Dr. told me the best thing to do was to go home and let my body do what it needed to do but if there was too much bleeding than I needed to go to the hospital.

On July 3^rd the bleeding and the pain got significantly worse.  I couldn’t get up from the toilet.  About 3am I told my husband that we needed to go to the hospital.  He called his brother who lived next door and he came over right away.  We grabbed a bunch of towels for me to sit on and we headed to the hospital.  I was in so much pain.  We got to the emergency room, my husband drove into where the ambulances go and he got me a wheelchair.  They got me into a room, there was blood everywhere.  They had the doctor on call helping me, trying to stop the bleeding.  I felt a lot of pressure and then a pop.  The baby came out.  The nurse got it from the doctor and put it in a cup.  She asked me if I wanted to see the baby.  I told her I did.

My baby looked perfect.  There were arms, legs, a little nose, eyes beginning to form and a sweet little mouth.  My baby was about 2 ½ inches long.   They let us take our time with our baby.  When we were ready to let go I gave the baby to the nurse.  She took the baby to the lab so they could run tests and see if they could tell why the baby had passed away.  When she got back she told me that there was something in between the baby’s legs that she believed that it was a boy.

All of my kids had a really hard time with it.  For a long time every time my oldest looked at me she would start crying.  We all wanted to name him.  We named him Brady.  All the labs came back and everything was normal.  Heaven just needed him more than we did.  My heart will never heal completely, there will always be a spot saved for him, but I know that I will be able to see my baby again and that makes the pain bearable.