When I was pregnant with Kota, my friend and I were talking and she said something along the lines of: "This is your rainbow baby" and I was like "huh?". I had never heard the term or phrase before so she explained it to me:
A rainbow baby is a baby born shortly after the loss of a previous baby due to miscarriage, stillbirth, or death in infancy. This term is given to these special rainbow babies because a rainbow typically follows a storm, giving us hope of what’s to come.
Taken from Here
I had my first miscarriage when I was 17 years old, a senior in high school, and after getting the mirena IUD put in right afterwards, I was told multiple times that I couldn't have kids. The mirena didn't end up working out for me so I had it removed and started getting the Depo shot. Then I found that the hormones in it were making my hair thin out super bad (I'll touch on pros and cons of the Depo shot in a post next week) so I decided that since I couldn't have kids then why be on birth control?
Two YEARS later I was joking around with my friends at work that I was late for my period. They ended up running me to wal mart and I took a test (then two more when I go home just to be sure) to find out that I was pregnant. I was terrified to tell J because he already had enough to handle with his two older children and we had no intention of having kids. Slowly, we got used to the idea and even got excited. I refused to tell anyone til I hit at least 10 weeks because I couldn't go through the torture of explaining to everyone that I had lost it. Unfortunately, this didn't work out because people at work found out pretty quick.
No more than a month later I started spotting. I tried not to panic, trying to convince myself that it was just old blood and everything was fine. My OB refused to see me until I was 10 weeks so I wasn't even sure how far along I was for sure. It was only a day or two before I started gushing blood and passing clots. At around midnight one night in May, I told J, I needed to go to the hospital and we went. The doctors said my hormone levels looked good but that wasn't anything to get excited about. They didn't have any open rooms so I had to "sleep" (aka toss and turn all night) on an ER cot and J was told he had to leave until they could do an ultrasound at 7am the next morning.
I was taken down to the ultrasound and the tech couldn't find a heartbeat and of course my heart broke into a million pieces. We left the hospital and I gathered myself together and went back to work. I put it out of my mind and worked through the pain as my body passed all the clots. Refusing to cry but silently dying, J and I fell apart. I blamed myself for not being good enough, for not doing enough, for being an awful person.
Fast forward through a very self destructive summer, I had my seizure incident (stay tuned tonight or tomorrow I'll have another deep post about all that..) and right before thanksgiving I found out I was pregnant with Kota. Obviously, I was a mess of nerves and anxiety about doing it all over again but I was excited.
Kota is my little rainbow baby. The heaven after all the hell I went through. My little miracle. Even as she's currently stirring in her crib, meaning I'm about to have another couple of hours of fighting her to sleep, I don't know what I would do without her.
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