I have to admit, as I write this I am still in the process of accepting what has happened. I still feel a great sense of loss when it comes to my birth experience and the things that should have naturally followed. The birth and postpartum experience I got were far from what I had imagined, in fact, it was the complete opposite of what I had hoped for. It feels like everyone I know had amazing, complication free birth experiences and enjoyed the normal ins and outs of raising healthy, full term, babies. I’m in the process of grieving the loss of that experience and coming to grips with the fact that what happened to us was many people’s worse fear come true. It was the experience that people feel grateful for not having. 

Those who know me know that I lean toward doing things naturally with as little medical intervention as possible. I had picked out a birth center to have the baby at. This birth center is not a hospital but is equipped with medical professionals and equipment should there be an emergency, and offers many alternative birthing tools such as a bathtub, birth ball, and birthing chair as opposed to strong pain medicines. However, the discovery of the twins at my 20 week anatomy scan threw all plans out the window. The birth center considers twins a high risk pregnancy so they do not accept them. So I was left with the choice of either a home birth with a midwife or a traditional hospital birth. Considering this was going to be our first birth experience, let alone, twins, we decided that the hospital would be our safest bet, even if less than ideal. I detailed the first few months after the birth of our girls in my previous blog, The Just Storm, for anyone who hasn’t read it and would like to. 

As I detailed in another post, The Conception of Hope, my husband and I were unable to conceive for a long time. Then finally, after almost 3 and a half years I finally saw those two lines on a pregnancy test on my birthday 2022! Looking back on my post, I’m drawn to this thought I had 

“I do hope to conceive one day but I don’t long for it. A longing comes with feelings of unfullfillment, pain, and sometimes even resentment. A longing has no hope, only anguish without a perceived end. A hope rests on God’s goodness even though we might not get exactly what we thought we would”

Upon seeing the positive test, my first instinct was to panic because I was not expecting it- I had long ago been able to give this hope to the Lord and He thus took away any longing I could have experienced during the past few years. Then slowly, the joy started to kick in, my husband and I started to reflect on all that has happened before getting to this point and how God answered our prayer at the perfect time. Pretty soon, we couldn’t wait to meet our baby—babies, as we found out later. Two babies, one that had a 5 month hospital stay and 4 surgeries, was not at all how we thought we would begin this journey. However, I am reminded as I said over 3 years ago… “A hope rests on God’s goodness even though we might not get exactly what we thought we would”.

Today, 7 months after the birth of our daughters we are finally getting to enjoy the sweet sleepless nights and the painfully adorable pouty faces and hearty screams. But it was hard work to get here. Before things got better, they got worse, and I feared that God would ask me to return the blessing he had given me. After Hosanna’s last major heart surgery, things got complicated. A few days post op it was discovered that she had pneumonia so we knew it was going to set her recovery back a bit. She had been placed on a ventilator for the surgery and the plan had been to remove it a few days after but with the pneumonia, there was now no plans of taking it out. She was started on very strong antibiotics and daily lung therapy treatments but her lungs didn’t seem to be getting better. On top of this, her belly began to get severely distended and no one really knew why. They feared it was another bout of “NEC” or “necrotizing enterocolitis” which she had had earlier in her hospital stay. The doctors didn’t tell us then, but looking into it, NEC is a pretty life threatening condition that can claim the lives of up to 50% of babies who get it. Because the cause of her bloated belly was unknown and she was at risk for reoccurring NEC, the doctors opted to stop feeding her and instead administer TPN (Total parenteral nutrition) a form of intravenous nutrition that goes directly into the bloodstream. This was the third time that she was not fed for an extended amount of time, the other times were the previous bout of NEC and at the very beginning of her hospital stay when her heart and lungs were very weak before the first surgery. This was one of the most difficult times because I could not bring in breast milk, the one thing I felt I could provide for her care, the one thing that made me feel like I was part of the team making sure she would be able to pull through. Further still, we were not even able to hold her for weeks due to her being connected to the ventilator plus a dozen other types of tubes, wires, and IVs. For months I prayed for our daughter’s healing, I knew God was able, but I feared that He wouldn’t. I feared that if I asked Him to do His will, His will would be my greatest fear- the loss of our baby girl. So for a long time, I couldn’t bring myself to ask for His will. Not that it’s wrong to ask for healing- but I knew I was asking because that’s what I wanted. I dared not utter that “His will be done, regardless” because when you ask for His will, you might not get what you want.

Through the months, there were some points where I heard God’s voice very clearly. Some of those times were as I worked through the devotional study “Experiencing God” by Henry Blackaby. In one of the reflections he described how he secretly got his son a bike when he was in elementary school even though his son wasn’t asking for one. His son continually wanted cheap toys that would break and that he would get bored of easily. Blackaby knew that a bike was a much better gift for him that would provide much longer entertainment, satisfaction, and skill. He made it a goal to convince him to ask for a bike for his upcoming birthday. Throughout the following weeks, Blackaby talked about bikes and bike riding and all the fun things that could be done with one. His son became captivated with the idea of a bike and thus, asked for one for his birthday. So when his birthday came around, he received the bike his father had already set apart for him. Anyone who is a parent knows that many times our children ask for things that we know are not going to satisfy them. They ask for things that break, go out of style, or don’t do much to enrich their lives or skills in any way. We as parents desire to give them the best gifts, but sometimes we need to convince our children that we know what is a better gift. Many of you may see where I’m going with this. It was obvious to me that God was telling me that I needed to ask for His will because His will was going to be better. I asked for a healthy child, for a complication free birth and pregnancy, for miraculous healings, all of which God said “no” to. So I had to come to grips with the fact that He was waiting for me to hand this whole situation over. 

The next day, the reflection in the devotional was also pushing me to ask for God’s will. It detailed Lazareth’s death (John 11). His sisters Mary and Martha both said to Jesus “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died”. Blackaby detailed his own thoughts about this scene and expressed that it seemed like Jesus was saying “You are exactly right. If I had come when you asked, your brother would not have died. You know I could have healed him, because you have seen Me heal people many times before. If I had come when you asked Me to, I would have healed him. But you would have never known any more about Me than you already understood. I knew you were ready for a greater revelation of Me than you have known before. I wanted you to experience that I am the Resurrection and the Life. My refusal and my silence were not rejection. They were opportunities for Me to disclose to you more of Me than you have ever known.” 

These messages were all prompting me pray for what I knew I had to pray for from the beginning but was too afraid to…. God’s will. So finally, one day as I sat reflecting on these reoccurring themes, I was ready to surrender our daughter to God. After months of beating around the bush I asked God for His will… I told Him that if He wanted to take my daughter to the point of death in order for His will to be fulfilled, then He should take her there. I told Him I was ready to see what He wanted to reveal to me about Himself, I was ready to know Him in a much deeper way than I had in the past. 

At this point, even though our daughter’s heart had been repaired, she was still very sick- intubated with a collapsed lung, heavily sedated, on narcotics so strong that a full grown adult wouldn’t be able to tolerate, unable to eat, and on a cocktail of antibiotics- and she was only about 6-7lbs. She was not getting any better and things had reached a point where we could sense that even her team of doctors and nurses were beginning to worry. A few days later I got a call early in the morning, seeing the hospital’s number I prepared for the worse. It was one of Hosanna’s doctors telling me that while she was getting an x-ray that morning, they noticed that her breathing tube wasn’t in the right place and was coming out. Because the breathing machine was still on high settings and she was still battling pneumonia, this could have potentially been very bad. When someone is on a ventilator, they usually need to slowly wean the settings down so the person can slowly start breathing on their own without help. However they noticed that she seemed to be breathing ok on her own so they decided to give her a chance. They warned that they might have to put it back in since they originally had no plans to take it out yet and there really was no telling how Hosanna would respond in the long run. The minutes, hours, and then days passed and Hosanna continued to breathe on her own with only the help of a nasal cannula (a form of oxygen given through the nose, not nearly as invasive as the ventilator.) 

From this moment on Hosanna began to improve, her belly almost immediately started going back to normal and her breathing stayed stable. Her doctors, nurses, therapists, and even her surgeon stopped by her room to see her because they had heard of her little “self-extubation” stunt and wanted to see how she was doing. The doctor who had called me stopped by to chat and seemed to be trying to make sense of what happened. She was surprised at how well Hosanna was doing for having been abruptly off the ventilator. She kept saying things like “maybe she was trying to tell us something” and that “she calls the shots” and “she sets the timeline”. Which was funny because maybe a week or two later there was another similar incident. 

As my husband walked into the hospital unit Hosanna was staying at, he noticed Hosanna’s room was full of doctors and nurses. He quickly walked over wondering what was going on, things had finally been looking up so it was scary to think something bad had happened. Upon arriving, a doctor met him at the door and told him that somehow Hosanna’s central line had came out. A central line (or peripherally inserted central catheter- PICC line) is a form of more permanent IV which is connected directly to the heart in order to administer medications, fluids and nutrition. Obviously, it’s not safe to simply yank out any IV line but especially not a central line given that it is inserted directly into the heart. At this point, Hosanna was fairly unresponsive as well, being in a deep sleep and not easily stirred even though there were many people around her prodding and poking. Many tests were ordered to make sure everything was ok- thankfully they all came back normal but Hosanna was still unresponsive so they kept a close eye. Her unresponsiveness was most likely unrelated to the PICC line coming out and more likely to have been a response to a narcotic she was receiving and was being weaned from. A few hours later after all the doctors and nurses had left, Hosanna woke up and flashed a cheesy smile to her daddy as if saying “what did I miss?”. With the central line removed, the risk of infection goes down drastically and I believe that was another thing that God paved the way to happen in order to get our girl out of the hospital. Things continued to look up and progress very quickly after this and the nurses awed at her comeback. Soon she began to tolerate feeds and even began drinking from a bottle- up until that point, she had mostly been fed through a feeding tube. Before we knew it, she was moved out of the PCICU (Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit) down to a regular inpatient room and was on her way to discharge, this time for real.

God answered our prayers for a child but the way things unfolded was not how we were hoping or expecting. In the same way, God made a promise to Abraham in the book of Genesis- He told him that he would have a son through his wife Sarah. They waited a long time, 25 years until God decided they were ready. Then, finally, after such a long wait, much doubting and bad decisions, Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah. Isaac was their only son, who I’m sure was loved and cared for deeply as he was the fulfillment of God’s great promise. Then one day, God asked Abraham for his son back. He asked him to sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Scripture doesn’t go into detail about how Abraham felt about this, it doesn’t describe his emotions or what was going through his mind but for anyone who has been a parent, its not hard to imagine how he must have felt. Even if Abraham understood that God was God and had the right to take his son, I’m sure it wouldn’t have changed how he felt in that moment. Abraham had every intention to obey God, he gathered the supplies, got his son and followed God’s directions. This doesn’t mean he didn’t go through an internal struggle before getting to the place of acting according to what God asked of him. As it turned out, God was testing Abraham, He hadn’t intended to really take His son, but wanted to see just how deep Abraham’s faith was, how much he really trusted Him. Once God saw that Abraham didn’t hold back his son, He stopped him from causing any harm to his son and sent him a ram to sacrifice instead.

While I longed to hold my baby in my arms and lay her on a changing table, I had to lay her on an alter instead. I thought of what I had learned years ago and wrote about in my post Enough to Let Go, where I reflected that mothers need to love enough to let their children go when it’s what God calls them to do. I had to let go of children as a foster mom and I know many mothers have had to let go through their children’s marriages, college, independence, illnesses, and accidents. God had to let go of His only son, Jesus, through death on a cross because He knew there was something much, much, greater to come that would far exceed the pain He had to endure. So I learned to ask for God’s will, even if that meant I wouldn’t get what I wanted, even if it meant it would hurt deeply. When I did that, He sent me the ram in the thicket.