The Nurse's moment un-missed.

It’s been 2 years since I found out I was pregnant with my heaven baby. A baby boy who made it 9 weeks in my belly.

I never told this story. In fact, the moment my husband reads this blog, it will be the first time he learns of it too.

Nobody loves recalling their miscarriage. At least nobody that I have found. However, meet any woman on earth and they can tell you where they were when it all started. They can tell you the emotions they felt. They can tell you every single detail because it marks you in a way you would never wish upon a single soul.

It was January 2020.

Yes, the year of infamy.

We celebrated Emmy Lou’s first birthday and 2 weeks later, I had a positive pregnancy test. If you back track into the history of me getting pregnant with Lou... it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. It involved synthetic hormones, rounds of treatment, shots in the stomach and foreign objects being shoved in my princess Diana more than I ever had hoped in my life and a whole lot of negative tests.

So, a positive pregnancy test? a miracle or a false positive?

Yep, a miracle.

We celebrated nonetheless. We saw our doctor and had positive blood levels and response to everything we were seeing.

Maybe my pregnancy with Lou truly got rid of my endometriosis after all.

Mid-march rolled around and I went in for another ultrasound.

The world was shaky at this time, enough to make us all wonder what the heck was going on, the doctor’s office was working nevertheless so we went in excitedly to see the baby’s heartbeat.

You can’t ever perfectly portray the emotion you feel in your soul when an ultrasound tech grows quiet and keeps searching, clicking and moving that wand around. Nothing burns quite like the questions you ask and the silence that deafens a room because a tech isn’t allowed to be the one to break the news to you that there is no heartbeat detected.

In your soul, I truly do not believe that there is a sound louder than silence, especially silence when there should be sounds of laughter or joy.

It’s the burn that sinks down in your skin like a branding iron, leaving a mark that can never be erased.

The doctor swiftly walked in and said, “there was no heartbeat, we will schedule a D+ C for tomorrow morning.”

The drive home feels so full of confusion because your brain can’t figure out if it should cry or stay in denial until you wake up from the bad dream.

The following day we returned and I was lying in my hospital bed, waiting to be taken back into surgery. The hospital was eery. Signs telling us to wear a masks for protection were popping up and things felt…. hollow. Every corner felt fearful as our nation was approaching a lockdown we never knew was possible.

The nurses came back to walk me into the operating room. Cold hands touching me, injecting me with foreign chemicals that would make me feel like I’d have seven too many tequilas in less than one minute.

Cody hugged and kissed me and the wheels of my bed made their squeaks towards the place where I never thought I would be.

My brain kept begging to wake up but stayed locked up the dam of tears that were stuck behind a cork waiting to pop.

I felt like there was a dam about to break in me but that cork still had ever tear plugged up from the trauma of not even knowing how to carry the weight of this type of loss.

Thoughts running through my head , ‘you never met this baby.’ ‘at least it was early.’ ‘think if women who have still born babies-way worse.’ ‘But why am I so sad when this was just a 9 week fetus.’

I kept my eyes closed and took deep breaths to keep my emotions calm before going under.

I felt a cold hand grab mine and squeeze it in a familiar way. In a way that reminded me that whoever was holding it was there for me. I opened my eyes and one of the nurses wheeling me down the hall looked down at me, “I am so sorry that this is why you are here, mama. You did so good. We are here with you. We are going to take care of you.”

The dam broke.

And that nurse, whose name I will never remember, whose face was half covered by cloth and hair pulled tight under a surgical cap, held my hand as I weeded through the loss of my baby. As I came to terms that what I thought was all healed was in fact still broken. She held my hand and let me sob. She held my hand as they lifted me to the table and she talked to me like I was an actual hurting human being as they asked me to countdown from 100 and take my deep breaths to sleep.

I’ll never know her name. I’ll never know why she chose to hold my hand. Maybe she had once been in that bed and wheeled down a hallway.

Maybe she felt an empathy beyond words.

What I do know is that the job she did was more than wheeling back a patient. She cared for the person lying in the bed.

She took a moment and remembered that after all her years of tireless schooling, she remembered a patient whose heart was shattered and nothing mattered more than holding her hand for a few minutes. She didn’t miss her moment to love me well. She didn’t miss her moment to lean into her kind heart and bless me.

I went to sleep and never saw that nurse again.

We traveled back to Montgomery post surgery, got home, shut the door and the nation locked down.

Grief hits even harder in the lonely places. It wrecks your ability to rationalize thought. A country locking down wasn’t exactly a way to avoid loneliness.

But when someone asks me what happened to the baby, where I was , if I ever experienced a miscarriage, I can tell them where I was standing. I can tell them the color of the walls in the clinic where silence punched me in the gut, I remember Cody hugging me and crying with me after surgery, and I remember the nurse.

I remember the nurse who did not let a moment go un-missed to care for me the way I needed.

To the nurse who let my dam break- I hope you never stop holding hands and making space for complete strangers whose souls you so perfectly see.

Thank you for not missing me.