by Paula Mitchell-Bentley

Created on: October 30, 2008   Last Updated: January 09, 2009

It was six months ago that my life took a dreadful turn. I was five months pregnant with my third child. Our family had just returned from a two week vacation to California. It was our "baby moon" - the last holiday before our new baby arrived. I had an ultrasound scheduled for the day after we arrived home. It was a routine ultrasound where we hoped to find out the baby's gender. Both of my other children were very excited to hear the news, as was the rest of our extended families.

The ultrasound was scheduled for the early afternoon. Now I am so grateful that my loving husband was at my side as he always is. I laid down on the examining table as the technician put the ultrasound gel on my ever increasingly large belly. She moved the wand from side to side while chatting with us. I was so excited to find out the gender and to hear that everything, of course, was going well. The technician suddenly stopped talking to us and left the room.

We waited an agonizing ten minutes which felt more like ten hours. I burst out in tears and asked my husband if he thought the baby was dead. He assured me that everything was going to be okay. He was wrong unfortunately. Nothing has been the same or "okay" since this horrific day.

A doctor came in and quite seriously and studiously became examining me with the wand. I cried, fearing the worst. And then, it came. He said "I'm sorry to tell you that your baby has no heartbeat". Those words still echo in my head six months later.

I ran crying from the room with the gel still all over my large tummy. I don't know where I was trying to get to or where I would have gone. I ran crying from the mall and out into the parking lot, past our car and kept going. My husband finally caught up with me as my body was racked with spasms from the sorrow.

We didn't know what to do. Our hearts were broken, our lives shattered. We started driving home. Our doctor called on the cell phone and told us to come to the office immediately. My husband pulled the car over and phoned our daughter's day home in tears. We needed to tell her that we were going to be late picking up our daughter. I don't know how our sitter even knew what he was saying, he was such a wreck. Next he called my mother to break her heart as well. We needed her to watch our son and pick him up from school. We did not know what was going to happen next.

When we arrived at our doctor's office, we were immediately ushered into a room. It was unbearable to see all those happy, pregnant women

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