I figured I should have a post properly introducing myself. I'm Abby. I'm 28, I'm a Physical Therapist who specializes in pelvic health. This means a lot of things. One thing it means is that my work has a lot to do with pregnancy, before, during, after. I take care of pregnant women, and postpartum women. More about this later.
I'm married. My husband's name is Anselm. He loves children. We currently have 4 nieces and 3 nephews.
Here's our story.
We found out we were pregnant at the end of January 2017. My grandfather had just passed away. We had already planned our honeymoon to Europe, the plan was to wait to get pregnant until after the honeymoon. Whoops. It was exciting. I was ready. We wanted to enjoy our honeymoon, enjoy the pregnancy between us. This new life we had made. So we waited to tell our family until we got back.
On our trip, we decided we'd incorporate my grandfather's name, Charles, into our baby's name. We spent a lot of time on the Charles Bridge in Prague. We attended the weekly audience with Pope Francis in Rome. So, our first baby, our angel baby, his name is Charles Francis.
On May 10th, I went in for an OB check. I thought I was 17 weeks. My doctor could not find a heartbeat with the over the belly device, then the transvaginal ultrasound, then I went to another floor to have it confirmed with the fancy ultrasound. I work at the hospital where this all happened. This was the first time I saw Charlie, but he was already gone.
I had to have a D&E a week later.
At this point, I was pretty far along. Lots of people knew. We hadn't done a social media post, or a gender reveal party. Thank goodness. We only know that Charles is a boy from the testing they did after the procedure.
Charlie stopped growing, likely, because he had Down Syndrome. Which is so bittersweet. It's like okay, that's a reason. That's why this happened. But lots of babies are born with Down Syndrome. Why didn't mine get to be born? In physician's speeches to patients who have miscarriages there's usually a statistic thrown in that a vast majority of miscarriages are from chromosomal abnormalities. Well, Down Syndrome is a chromosomal abnormality. That's the answer.
The other answer is that God wanted my baby to be with Him. And maybe Anselm and I needed someone in Heaven praying and interceding just for us. Maybe for this new little one.
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