Reasons

After I lost William, the biggest thought looming in my head was "WHY?" I'm not talking about a spiritual, metaphysical why-do-bad-things-happen-to-good-people why. That really didn't concern me too much. I knew that I have a deal with my Heavenly Father, and that it's not part of that deal that nothing bad will ever happen to me, no matter how "good" I may be. It was the logical, mathematical what-went-wrong why that kept me up at night. Why did my body just give up on my perfect, healthy baby and go into labor?

I played back the last week of my pregnancy over and over. I combed the internet looking for information, for stories like mine. At my checkup the week after I delivered William, my OB had kept talking about doing a cerclage next time around--since my placenta "looked fine" and it didn't seem like I had an infection, he'd said I probably just had an incompetent cervix. This really didn't sit right with me (my cervix had been plenty competent during my first two pregnancies, for starters), but I included IC in my ever-growing list of conditions to research.

I finally worked up the nerve to go in to my OB's office and request a copy of my records--included was the results from the pathology exam. A little background here: This was my first baby with "Dr. W."--we'd moved just before Anna was born and I finished out that pregnancy with the same OB I'd seen with Elizabeth. I hadn't felt great about the "vibe" I got from Dr. W--in fact, I had been looking for a new doctor when everything fell apart. I need to be straight here: I don't blame Dr. W. for my loss. There was nothing he did or didn't do to make this happen. But that said, I wish he'd been a little more proactive--at least sending me in for a thorough ultrasound when I kept bleeding long after the first trimester. It would've been nice to know that I did indeed have a sizeable subchorionic hematoma, as the pathology report noted. It would've been nice to know that this put me at a higher risk for P-PROM, infection, and early labor.

Or maybe I should thank my lucky stars that I didn't know any of that. If I had known, maybe I would've ended up on hospital bedrest and IV tocolytics and antibiotics, only to delay the inevitable. Maybe I should be grateful that my little boy didn't have to hang around for extra days or weeks slowly getting sick from the infection that, according to the pathologist's report, had begun to invade.

Marginal hematoma. Signs of early acute choriamnionitis. Inflammation of the basal plate and decidua. I have my reasons, these hollow answers to my "why". But, of course, now I have a whole host of new questions.