When I was 16 weeks along, I had an amniocentisis as one of my previous children was born with Down Syndrome. We would not have terminated this pregnancy if anything was wrong, but we wanted to be sure everything was okay. About a week-and-a-half later, much to our great joy, the results came back normal and we discovered that we were having a girl!!
Two weeks later, I had another doctor's appointment, so we spent some time beforehand shopping. I bought a maternity outfit and we looked at rockers. My husband wanted one to rock the baby with. Then we headed over to the doctor's office.
After some chit-chat, I climbed up so the nurse practitioner could listen for her heartbeat. She kept hearing mine, but we could not find the baby's. Well, we had been through this before, so it was not a problem yet. The nurse came in to see if she could find it. She could not. She then did a quick office ultrasound. I could see that the baby was not moving and I could not see any fluttering in her chest area. The nurse kept saying things like "I have her at a really bad angle," but deep in my heart I knew that she was gone.
They decided to send me over to the hospital for an ultrasound there. My husband had been waiting in the van with the kids, so I ran to tell him I had to go do the ultrasound.
In the hospital ultrasound room, it was the same scene on the monitor--my sweet baby girl lying motionless with no heartbeat. I was in shock. The doctor came in and did some looking, then told me it was certain that my baby was dead. He could not see a reason on the ultrasound.
I went out to the van not knowing how I was going to tell my husband that his daughter was gone, but my face and my tears told him everything. My son started to cry. My husband started to cry. I was crying. The other kids couldn't quite understand what was happening.
I went in to the hospital the next day where they induced labor at 1 p.m. Gabrielle was born at 4:40 a.m. The cord was wrapped around her neck 3x. That is the reason she left us so soon. We held her and had the Deacon come and baptize her. We were able to spend 2 short hours with her before I had to go down for a D & C.
She was buried at the feet of her grandmother 3 days later. She will always be loved and always be missed.