Part I - Our Sad News

Well, I'm not sure if this place is the appropriate place to be putting my thoughts down but I thought it might be good for me to get my thoughts written (actually typed) out. It will be good for me I think and maybe good for others to read and respond. I think I will post this in two parts - one that describes what happened and what we went through and one that describes how we've been dealing with it.

Part I.
Last Thursday (01/04/06) afternoon Andrea and I found out that the baby we had been looking forward to having at the end of May had died a couple of weeks ago. Andrea had gone into have the doctor check things out and they were unable to hear a heartbeat. The nurse listening for the heartbeat wanted to do an ultrasound to see what was going on inside the womb. What she found was that instead of being at 19 week size - the baby had stopped growing around 17 weeks - AND there was no heartbeat.

At this point Andrea called me from her cell phone as the nurse went to get someone else to check out the ultrasound. It was completely unexpected and sent both Andrea and I reeling. We both had had fears that this would happen (natural feelings) but thought that since the baby had made it so far that we were really out of the woods. So, I went to the doctor's office to pick Andrea up and we just cried and prayed for a while. It seemed like a bad dream - we were both numb.

The doctor told Andrea that she had two choices - to have a "D&E" (where they would simply pull the baby out like an abortion) or to go through the process of inducing labor and giving birth to a dead baby. Out of respect to the child that we would not be able to meet this side of heaven we chose to have labor induced. Thankfully Stephen and Jasmine (my brother and sister-in-law) came up and took our two daughters (4 and 2 yrs old) back down to GA to stay with my mom.

Monday morning we went into the Drs. office and they confirmed with another ultrasound that the baby had died - this was my first look at the ultrasound that confirmed the sad news. They eventually moved Andrea over to the hospital and started inducing labor. We had hoped that this would be a quick thing and that we could get it over with as fast as possible. Unfortunately Andrea had to go through hours of labor.

Finally at 3:39am Tuesday morning she gave birth to a little girl. We named her Charis (Greek - meaning grace). She was so very small – 4 ounces and 7 inches long. We were given the option to hold her and we both agreed that we would like to. All of the nurses and techs walked out of the room and left us alone for as long as we needed. We looked at our Charis that we would not get the privilege of watching grow up and cried and prayed some more – this was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my whole life. With tears in our eyes we gave her back to the nurse – we would not be taking her home as we had hoped since we found out we would be having a new baby.

Andrea had to stay in hospital until about 2pm on Tuesday – still having contractions and very sore. We came home that night and rested and have basically been resting ever since. We have had our friends from church come over and bring food to us and have had lots of people praying for us and encouraging us.

To any normal person this would have been devastating I am sure. Make no mistake – it has been one of the hardest things I've ever had to face – but it has been our faith and our faithful God that has seen us through. Something that might have been devastating turns into something that can bring hope. I will talk more about this in the second part.