Grateful

I am grateful for my life, and sad that my son isn’t here.  Those two things are not mutually exclusive feelings, and while that might not sound earth-shattering, it has taken several months for me to come to this realization.

Recently, I read an article about a young, healthy woman, Lauren Bloomstein, (a NICU nurse, actually) who died from HELLP Syndrome.  (It’s long, but you can read it here if you want).  While I had a very short amount of time to accept my diagnosis, I’ve always understood the gravity of HELLP Syndrome, and how sick I was in the hours before I delivered Brady.  However, it’s taken me several months to come to terms with the fact that the decision to deliver wasn’t a decision of my life or Brady’s, it was a decision that was best for both of us.  HELLP is not a slow killer, and had I not been under the care of competent doctors, I truly believe I wouldn’t have made it long.

When Brady passed away, I think it was easy for my brain to go to the “I would give anything to have it be me instead” place, but that’s not an option that was ever logically on the table in our situation.  It wasn’t me or him, it was me and him, always.  A couple more days inside for Brady couldn’t have prevented what would happen – his infection was an awful wild card.  Jeff knew this right away, and took comfort in the fact that I was still here.  He knew that I couldn’t see comfort in the same thing, because I would rather have had it be me than Brady, no matter how impossible that scenario was.

There were so many points in that article where I cringed as a doctor or a nurse failed to take Lauren’s symptoms seriously.  They failed to recognize that Lauren was seriously ill, refusing even the diagnosis of preeclampsia until she had already suffered a hemorrhagic stroke.  By the time she was diagnosed, it was much too late.

There are conflicting statistics on HELLP Syndrome – some state that without early treatment, 25% of women with HELLP will have serious complications while others state that the global mortality rate is 25%.  Either way you put it, HELLP is serious, and early intervention is necessary to prevent serious complications.  I think now about how grateful I am that I was under the care of competent doctors, who immediately recognized the warning signs and knew when I was in trouble.

Of course, reading a story about a mother who died from HELLP Syndrome is a whole different level of tragic, but I have read countless other stories where mothers have survived HELLP but required emergency surgeries (beyond the c-section) or spent long periods of time the ICU because they didn’t get help in time.  In hindsight, I think of these stories and it makes me so much more grateful that our doctors did what they did for us.  Knowing now that we’d only get 14 days with Brady, I could have easily been in the ICU or recovering from serious surgeries and not been able to make the most of those 14 days.  Our doctors gave me and Brady the best shot at life, and gave me the opportunity to spend as much time with our little man as possible.

Perspective is a strange thing, and I have a much different view on things with the lens I’ve developed over the last 5 months.  Don’t take this to mean that I am accepting of our situation or “at peace” with things, because I am still far from that.  These are baby steps of bringing back some parts of the “old me”.