I never, in my lifetime, did I imagine that I would experience the loss of a child. I had heard stories about friends of friends of friends and read about losses on the Internet, but the thought never crossed my mind that I could be that friend of a friend of a friend. My loss was not an easy one to overcome, not that any loss is, but mine was definitely unexpected and devastating. Normally in pregnancy if you get past those first twelve weeks your chances of losing the baby decrease drastically. I had gotten past that first trimester and even the second trimester. I was in my third trimester when things went wrong.

We didn't catch it at first. I went to my doctors appointment and everything was pretty much normal except I had gained a bit of weight from my last visit and was measuring ahead of schedule. To be on the safe side we scheduled and ultrasound to make sure everything was alright. Now of course, my darker, freak-out side knew something was not right, but my more logical, happy side pushed those feelings of fear and anxiety deep down until I could barely tell they were there. They were there though and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was seriously wrong.

On July 10th my fears were confirmed and we found that our precious, perfect, little baby girl was in heart failure. Not something that any parent wants to hear and on top of that, there was very little known about her condition and therefore not a standard of care that the healthcare team could follow. I was admitted to the hospital and underwent a drug regimen that was designed to cross the placenta and hopefully reverse the heart failure. This was tried for four days until her condition worsened and I delivered via emergency c-section. It was not a good week. How could my little girl, Amaris Grace, have undergone such an ordeal and I didn't even realize until it was too late? As a mother, shouldn't I have known that something was wrong, shouldn't I have made the doctor's listen to my concerns? There were so many questions that I would ask myself, but the thing is, they are not questions that anyone can answer including myself. Sometimes things happen that catch us by surprise, sometimes they are amazing and wonderful things. This was not one of them. This was a devastating, heart-breaking, disastrous thing to undergo and this is one thing I would never wish on a single human in the world.

Surprisingly, against the odds, our little miracle baby survived delivery

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