Clayton's birth...

One of the questions that I am asked the most is, "what happened?" It is a pretty shocking thing to have your water break at 21 weeks. I wasn't planning on sharing the birth story at first, but that's pretty much the only way to explain what happened so I wanted to do a brief (ya, it's not so brief) summary of it on here...

Friday morning I woke up feeling pretty sick. I'd had a fever and achy body for two days now. I took some Tylenol to lower the fever and got comfy on the couch for the morning. I had been having a lot of "braxton hicks" contractions that morning. It seemed like every time I stood up, bent over, or did anything I would have a contraction. I really tried to brush it off thinking they were braxton hicks, but looking back I realize that I was in the early stages of labor. I wish that I would have paid more attention, but I didn't.

I put Tru down for a nap around 11:30 AM and went to lay down myself. I talked to my mom for a few minutes, complained about the "flu" I thought I was getting and told her about the contractions. I made a mental note to talk about it to my doc at my next appointment. When I got off the phone I got up to use the bathroom before my nap. When I walked into the bathroom, my water broke. Just like that. Fluid everywhere. I grabbed my phone and called my doctor. He was out of town (of course) so the nurse told me to get to labor and delivery ASAP. I called Trent and told him what had happened and told him to come pick me up so we could go to the hospital (he had the car that day.) In the time that it took Trent to come home I called everyone that I could think of to see if they could watch Tru. Everyone was either out of town, working, not home, kids had stomach flu.... I couldn't find anyone. So Tru came with us to the hospital.

On the way to the hospital I could feel this little baby kicking around. It broke my heart. I just kept saying, "Little baby, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." I knew that he was too young to make it through this, I knew that he was going to have to die. It was horrible.

We got to the hospital and got all checked in. I changed and one of the specialists I had been seeing came over to do an ultrasound. That was the last time that I saw my little boy alive. He was alive!!! He was playing with his hands, kicking, moving all over. The doctor verified that my water bag had ruptured. He then turned off the machine and sat so he could look at both Trent and I. He told us that we had two options. I could wait, lay there, see if I was able to keep enough fluid in me to have the baby keep growing. Even if I did that there was no guarantee that he was going to make it. The rate I was loosing fluid was so fast he didn't think that I would have enough in there by morning for him to survive. He then suggested that we induce labor and birth him, and have him die. He told us that we had a 1% chance of him making it, and that was on the condition that he stay in there for 3 more weeks. I told him that I was not comfortable making the decision inducing labor. To me that felt like I was killing my child, and I was not going to do that. So we decided to wait.

I laid there for a few hours. Trent called our families to tell them what was going on. Tru was such a good boy, it was nice to have him there to give me kisses and smile at me. Trent finally found someone to watch Tru. A girl from his office that works as a janitor there was getting off work at 3 PM. She really loves Tru, she always wants to play with him and hold him when we come visit Trent at work. I just had to trust her, I had no other options. Trent trusted her so I said okay... that was hard too. We made arrangements for Trent's sister who lives 2 hours away come down to get him after work and keep him for the weekend.

While Trent was taking Tru down to meet the sitter my nurse came in to talk to me. I told her how I was not going to make the choice to kill my baby. I would rather lay there for weeks with just a 1% chance then give him no chance. She looked at the monitor and looked back at me and said, "Well, I think that your body is going to make that choice for you." I was having contractions, and they were starting to get more intense. By 3:30 PM I was dilated to a 3 and my contractions were 1 1/2 minutes apart. My body had made the choice for me.

I labored until 5 PM and I was done with the pain. I was dilated to a 5 and had an epidural. The labor was the same with my little 1 lb baby as it was with my 9.5 lb baby. I really don't know how people have babies without epidurals. I was in so much emotional pain the physical pain on top of it really was too much. The guy had to place the epidural 3 times to get it right. Once it was working right I was good. That was a hard part too because I had been able to feel the baby moving until I had my epidural.

At 7:45PM the doctor on call came in to check on me. He told me that I would be having a c-section because I had a c-section with Tru. I told him the only reason I had one with Tru was because he was huge, his big head couldn't fit out of my bones. He said that in the ultrasound that the baby was feet down, and they were not going to let me try to have him if it took more than two pushes to get him out. Too risky. The doctor then checked me, and much to all of our surprise the baby was already halfway out of my cervix... head down. I like to think that this was little Clayton's gift to me. Being a good baby and pretty much "birthing himself" so that I didn't have to have a c-section. They told me to call them when I felt the urge to push. The urge never came. He really did birth himself, I never even had to push. It's hard to say when he died. He was alive at the ultrasound, I felt him moving until I had my epidural, but he never struggled to breath once he was born. He didn't have any lungs. I was afraid that I would have to see or hear him struggle and I thought that I would not have been strong enough to witness that. He was silent, he didn't even have any lungs to try to take a breath with.

Once the baby came out they cleaned him up and set him on the table. Then came the hard part. It took an hour to get the placenta out. I lost a lot of blood. I just kept praying that it would come out. Trent was a trooper, he stood by my side through the whole thing. Finally it came out and they cleaned me all up, and I was able to hold my son.

Everyone left the room and it was just me, Trent, and Clayton. I held him for an hour and a half. I looked at all his little parts, his tiny feet and hands. He was a little tiny person. He has feet like Trent and Tru, ears like Trent and Tru. My mouth. I sat there and picked out all of the different parts that he had like his dad and me, just like you do with any other baby. His skin was so thin, it wasn't the color of normal baby skin. He was a dark dark purple. His little foot was the size of the pad of my thumb. They had put his hospital bracelet around his waist. He was perfect.

I didn't cry through the birth, I had such a peaceful feeling wash over me and I just laid there and soaked it in. When it was just us after the delivery, that's when Trent broke down. I've only seen him cry 3 times in our 7 1/2 years of being together, this made #4. I was able to be strong for him at that time. Then when I broke down (and continue to break down) he was able to be strong for me. We had made it through this. As hard as it was, we did it. We had lost something so precious to us, it was really hard and unexpected.

I have a hard time thinking of Clayton as a stillborn. To me I think of a stillborn baby as a baby that dies inside of the mom and then has to be born. He was alive, there was never anything wrong with him. It was the support system needed to grow a baby that had failed. I think of this instead as a preemie that didn't survive the birth.

So to answer the question "what happened" here is what I was told. I was told by the specialist that the sack that holds the baby needs to be right up against the uterine wall. That is how it becomes strong and gets its' nutrients. Since I had been bleeding for over 10 weeks, there were parts of that sack that were not able to be up against the wall, due to the blood. They think that those parts became weak and that is why the bag ruptured. I also had some type of an infection, I'm not sure where it was, but I did not have the flu. They think that I might have developed an infection "in there" because of the bleeding that had been taking place. I really feel that something was going to happen, Clayton was not meant to live on this earth. If it wasn't the water breaking it was going to be something else.

It seems sureal to write this story out now. I'm so sad that it happened, it was a really hard thing to go through, but we did it. We made it through. There is the story of Clayton's birth...