Day 3 - Part II, The Options, March 31

The afternoon that we lost Grace, the specialist came to talk to us. He said there was a very small chance we could save the second baby.

He said that our case was very unusual, because contractions hadn't started. Normally, when the water breaks, contractions will follow and this is what triggers both babies to be delivered. But I didn't have contractions delivering Grace and my body wasn't showing signs of delivering the second baby. The second baby had her own sac, so her water hadn't broken and the cervix had even closed up some. (It might be confusing, the idea of delivering a baby without contractions. My cervix had dialated to the same size as the babies, just 5 cm around, so contractions weren't necessary.)

How do you have in your heart one minute grieving the passing of your baby and in the next minute, feel like the second baby might come back to life? How do you get your head around what the doctor is saying, to make sense of it all, when you just want to lay in your bed and cry?

I pictured two buckets in my mind. They were red metal buckets. I put my guilt into the first red bucket and I put my grief for Grace in the second red bucket. I knew I would get back to them both, but for now I needed to focus on Sophia.

The specialist explained to us the option of a rescue cerclage. A regular cerclage was the surgery to stich up the cervix when it might dialate too early. This is done for women who are known to have a weak cervix and it is done early in the pregnancy. The regular cerclage was pretty common and it had a high success rate.

The rescue cerclage was different. This was done after the boundary between the uterus and the outside world had been violated. This was much less common because there was a high risk of serious infection and because it was unlikely to be successful in prolonging the pregnancy long enough to have a healthy baby. Most cases involved bulging membranes past the cervix, but it was even more rare for it to be done when one baby had already been delivered.

We didn't know how to figure this out. On the one hand, if there was a chance, no matter how small, to save Sophia, of coarse we would do it. But on the other hand, it had a very small chance of actually working and a pretty good chance of causing severe medical complications for me. The specialist gave examples of women who had hysterectomies and another women whose infection got into her bloodstream and had to have two fingers and part of one foot amputated.

Besides that, we needed to decide in the next day or two, because the specialist didn't want more time to pass when bacteria could get from the outside world into the uterus, then get trapped inside when the surgery is done.

We couldn't decide that night, it was too much.