The beginning

My "fresh" perspective began on the worst day of my life.  My husband, Frank and I were 23 weeks 2 days pregnant when our twin daughters were born angels.  

It took us about a year to get pregnant which made the positive pregnancy test that much more exciting.  Immediately I bought no less than 25 pregnancy books and read all of them cover to cover.  Even my husband got sucked into the pregnancy vacuum.  I followed every dietary restriction, exercised regularly, took pre-natal yoga, prayed, rubbed my belly, talked to my belly,  eat organic, never missed a pre-natal vitamin, and overall felt like a glowing beautiful pregnant woman.  Everything was right on track, I was having a great pregnancy, so I thought.  

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 I came home from work and had some tightening in my upper abdomen and lower back pain.  The on-call physician told me to "come in" to L&D triage to get checked out.  Sure enough I was having contractions.  Three L&D triage visits & 1 office visit later they still didn't know what was going on, the contractions were not subsiding.  I was on antibiotics for a possible kidney infection (although my urine was clean), pain killers for the contractions, trebutaline to reduce the contractions, and strict bed rest.  Again, I followed my doctors and nurses orders to the t.  By Saturday the contractions were much worse and at this point even the pain killers weren't helping.  That night we went into L&D triage again and routinely they searched for the baby's heartbeats.  They couldn't find the heartbeats on doppler or ultrasound in triage, so I was transported down to Radiology where the ultrasound machines & techs are much more accurate.  Each previous visit, finding the heartbeats had been a challenge because there were 2 of them and I was only 23 weeks.  As the transporter wheeled me to radiology and my husband walked beside me, I had no idea that the babies could be in trouble.  

The ultrasound tech spent about 1 minute on my belly and ran out of the room saying "I'll be right back".  My husband and I looked at each other wondering what was wrong.  She returned explaining that she couldn't tell us anything without a doctor present and that the on-call radiologist wouldn't be there for another 30-45 minutes.  "What????"  We looked at each other in disbelief, my heart dropped and a I felt like I had just taken my last breath.  Our doctor had given us his pager number early in our pregnancy (not sure why, either he liked us or we looked high maintenance), so my husband paged him.  "Do you know what is going on, because they won't tell us anything?" Frank asked... long pause... "OK, we'll see you in a bit".  He turned to me, with the saddest eyes I've ever seen, and had to tell me that our babies no longer had heart beats.  We spent the next 30 minutes sobbing hugging and praying that this was a nightmare.  

8:00am the next morning I delivered our babies, vaginally, after a long night of induced labor.  We held our sweet angels and even in my grief ridden state I looked at our sleeping girls and knew that my life would never be the same.  They changed me forever.  

So there you have our very sad story!  My objective in telling you this is to give you a bit of history so you can better interpret where I am coming from.  Despite having the "perfect" pregnancy I still lost my sweet angels.  I have had to dig deep into the depths of my soul to find a way to move forward from that tragic day.  

So here I sit 3 months later creating a blog.  A blog that is intended to recount the aftermath of my tragic loss, the process of healing, and maybe even getting pregnant again.  I hope that someday soon I will become pregnant and I plan to chronicle the whole thing, from this new perspective.  I want to write about the entire process, the frustrations, the highs and lows, and the miracle of getting pregnant.  I want to write about an inspired pregnancy, one that isn't full of the modern day pregnancy propaganda, but one that is about the pure and simple miracle of creating life.  I'm not sure which direction each entry will go, but I promise to speak honestly and from the heart.  Think of me as the Jerry McGuire  of pregnancy bloggists.