Owen’s Birth Story

Owen, our surprise baby…

From the time I found out I was pregnant, something did not seem right. I told a couple friends and my sister, that’s it. I had spotted prior to the positive pregnancy test, stopped spotting, then spotted again. That was a giant red-flag that something was wrong. I know some people will spot through their entire pregnancy, but I’ll call it a mother’s instinct- I just knew.

When we went for our initial info meeting at the ob/gyn the nurse said it was probably just implantation bleeding and it was written off. At around 7 weeks I had severe cramping that absolutely made me feel like I was dying (and I have a crazy high tolerance for pain). Then the pain would go away completely. Then it would come back. Then it would go away. I went to the ob/gyn for an appt because of this pain at 8 weeks. She said if it came back again, go to the hospital. Sure enough, wound up in the hospital on a Monday. The doctor there said that everything looked good and I was sent home. On Wednesday I had an appointment for an ultrasound to see if they could find out what was wrong. They said it was a corpus luteum cyst. I was told the pain would last awhile, but it was nothing to really worry about. Skip to Sunday morning. I went to work at 5am and by 6am I was screaming in the bathroom from pain. I tried lying on the floor, sitting down, standing up, squatting, but nothing would relieve the pain. After calling my boss to come in, I called my husband to come pick me up. A few minutes later, I called him back telling him we were going to the hospital and not back home.

My mom met us at the hospital because Tommy couldn’t come back until someone could sit with Charlie (no children allowed). Mom ended up coming back and going with me to radiology. After the tech finished, the radiologist came in (we immediately knew this wasn’t a good thing). I thought I was losing my baby- that’s all I could think about. The radiologist said there was a lot of fluid and they couldn’t see one of my ovaries. When I was returned to the triage room, I was told I needed surgery to remove all the fluid. They explained the risks- the only thing I heard though was the possibility of losing my baby and the possibility of never being able to have another. I cried because of pain, I cried because I was scared of another surgery, I cried because I might lose my baby, and mostly I cried because I felt like I was choosing me over my baby.

I remember coming out of surgery and being told that they had taken one of my fallopian tubes, that I had an ectopic pregnancy that had ruptured my tube (that’s what all the fluid was, I was bleeding internally). I broke down. I was supposed to have twins, but only one had made it down the track. They checked for a heartbeat on the other baby and said all was good as of then.

This is called a heterotopic pregnancy. There is very little info on these because they occur only about 1 in 30,000 in pregnancies that were naturally conceived. It is slightly more common (about 1 in 1,000) with fertility treatments. A heterotopic pregnancy is when there is an intrauterine pregnancy at the same time there is an ectopic pregnancy. When this happens, the intrauterine pregnancy has a 33% chance of miscarrying.

As you can see though, we like to like to defy odds and Owen made it!

I was hoping for a VBAC, but scheduled a c-section for October 29th, two days after the Oct 27th due date. After having contractions for several days and consistent contractions all night, we went in for our c-section on the 29th and asked to be checked. I was at 3 cm with steady contractions. We were going to try!

But… After 15 hours of trying and slowly progressing- he got stuck. I wound up having another c-section, but to a perfectly healthy baby boy!

Although I’m outnumbered in my house, Owen will complete our family. I’d rather have 2 boys than try again and leave my 2 boys with no mommy. Both of our boys were meant to be here, we truly believe they are our little miracles. They had to fight to be here and stay here and we are very blessed to have them in our lives.