I gave birth to a sleeping baby

There are not many posts I will put a warning on before reading but this is one of them

In August 2023, a week before I was to go back to work from W’s mat leave, we found out we were expecting baby #2.  We were over the moon excited.  W was going to be a big brother.

I had challenges with bleeding in the first trimester, but I had also had those problems with W.  We had 4 ultrasounds by the time we reached the second trimester.  Everything was looking great on the screen.  We made it to 12 weeks which we thought meant we were in it for the long haul and we were going to be taking this baby home.

As the second trimester started, I noticed I didn’t feel as many movements with this baby as I had with W.  I chalked it up to nerve damage from W’s c-section, and my doctor reassured me that every pregnancy was different.  We were booked in for our 20 week anatomy scan, and our doctor told us she would go through results at our next scheduled appointment, but would call if there were any problems.

Cody and W dropped me off at the doors of the hospital, and I went in for my ultrasound.  I went through the normal small talk with the ultrasound tech as she did my scan.  At the end of the scan, she showed me our baby and I knew something was wrong.

His positioning was nothing like W’s was when we had his anatomy scan.  The ultrasound tech said our doctor would follow up if needed as she couldn’t tell me any findings.

Cody picked me up from the doors of the hospital, and I burst into tears.  I told him something was wrong and he looked at me and asked what they had said.  I told him they didn’t tell me anything but I just knew.

Later that afternoon, I got a call from my doctor.  I knew it wasn’t good news as she wasn’t going to follow up unless there was something wrong.  She told us that they couldn’t see everything they were supposed to see on the ultrasound so we were going to be referred to a fetal specialist in Winnipeg.

We met with the fetal specialist in Winnipeg, and thankfully we saw the doctor moments after our scan.  The doctor told us how they weren’t able to see all of our baby’s organs, and that their was something wrong with our baby’s heart.  At this point we wanted to rule out a genetic condition so we decided to have an amniocentesis done.  We would have results back within a week.

We got results back that our baby had triploidy.  This meant that instead of our baby having 2 copies of each chromosome, they had 3.  It also meant that our baby would die before or shortly after birth.  With all the love that we had for our baby, we decided that we did not want them to go through anymore suffering so we decided to induce labour early.

On Monday, January 8th, Cody and I made our way to the Women’s Hospital at the Health Science Centre for the hardest day of our life.  We were met with a compassionate team that walked us step by step of everything that was going to happen.

Labour was hard, especially knowing what the outcome was.  At 2:45pm, our son Isaac was born sleeping.  We held him for hours and told him how much he was loved.  Then the hardest moment of my life came when we had to hand him over to the nurse and say goodbye one last time.

My heart aches.  It feels like only now (2 and a half month later) that grief is just starting to set in.  Not just the grief of losing our son in that moment, but the grief of losing what he had in store for his life.  

We love you baby boy more than you will ever know.