Talia's Birth Story

I wish I had a birth story for all five of my beautiful babies, because they all deserve their stories, but unfortunately only our precious Talia made it far enough to have what most would consider a birth story. So, that's what I'll start with today.

I’m going to start from the beginning, which is several days before she was born. May 31^st, John and I were at a friend’s place for a scheduled game night. It had taken a while for us to all manage to finally get together. A few hours into the night on one of my many trips to the bathroom, I realized I was bleeding so I told John and off to the hospital all of us went; yes, all of us. Not just John and I, but our four friends as well.

They admitted us to maternity triage and it took me back into a room. After what felt like forever waiting for someone to come check us out, we finally had someone come in. It was one of those moments where I could tell just by the look on the woman’s face that something was wrong; you know those moments? The one where you feel your heart just drop completely out of your body. The woman told me I was four centimeters dilated and that the water sack was already pressing through. She told me that they were going to admit me into the hospital for overnight observation and then they brought me up to Labor and Delivery. It was there that we were able to get an ultrasound to find out what we were having; a little girl! Our Talia Aoife-Grace! It was then that we also managed to get a very clear recording of her heartbeat as well.

The hope was that the bed rest would allow the water sack to return back into my body and then they could perform a cerclage; where they go in surgically and tie the cervix closed with sutures.

Well, we made it overnight without any incident but it seemed that nothing had changed; I was still four centimeters dilated and the water sack was still pushing out. So they turfed me up to the Hospital’s High Risk unit and into my own room. That was Saturday night. I didn’t get much sleep the night before nor did I get much sleep that night as well.  That weekend I had a revolving door of nurses, doctors and friends staying the night with me. John couldn’t stay because we had the dogs and they had to work, but they made sure that someone was with me almost all the time; except for Sunday night. No one was able to stay with me Sunday, so when the Maternal Fetal Medicine people came early on Monday morning, well I was alone. John was trying to get there, but they didn’t really make it in time for the appointment at all.

That appointment was when we realized that there wasn’t anything that could be done. When they did the ultrasound they saw that Talia’s feet and legs were actually already down through the cervix and they told me that my options were to induce labor or wait it out. I couldn’t induce; I just couldn’t. They told me that she wouldn’t make it if we had her then and there, that they wouldn’t even try to resuscitate because she was beneath the twenty three week mark. I asked them if there was a chance she would hold on until the twenty three mark in there and they said that it was less than miniscule chance but I just couldn’t induce. If there was even just a one percent chance that our little girl could make it, I was going to give her every single opportunity to do so.

When they left me alone in the room, I sobbed. My heart was breaking, I could feel it, and it felt like I was in a waking nightmare. I didn’t try to keep it quiet, I sobbed until I couldn’t cry anymore, or so I thought.

John showed up about forty-five minutes after the visit from MFM and I had to explain to them what was going on and what the doctors had said. Those tears I thought had run dry? They hadn’t. We both sobbed our hearts out.

For me, after that, the day passed in a blur. I honestly don’t remember much of what happened on Monday after the visit from MFM. Just that I forced myself to work and John was there for most of the day. They had to go to work and go be with the dogs, so a friend came to spend the night with me in the hospital. What I DO remember from Monday is that that night the sporadic cramps that I had been feeling all weekend kicked up a bit in pain. So much so that a couple of them had me practically jumping out of bed from pain and I actually scared our friend at one point with how suddenly I jumped out of bed.

Other than that, Monday night was uneventful.

Tuesday came and John came back to stay with me for the night. They also told me that my mother was on her way down; it was originally meant to be a surprise, but my dad had spilled the beans on that one. So I was happy for that; with everything that was happening I wanted my mother there as well.

Tuesday during the day was uneventful for the most part; the cramps were still happening and sometimes they were worse than others, but they were still irregular. There was no pattern to them at all. As it got later into the evening, I started feeling more pain; like woke me up out of a nap, pain. It eventually got to the point where I felt like I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t lay down, I could just stand at the end of the bed, bent over and almost crying. It hit me then that these were actually contractions, so my tears were a mixture of pain and heartbreak.

They managed to get me back in the bed and it took me a little while longer before I finally agreed to some kind of pain management. They gave me a shot of dilaudid and told me they were going to bring me over to Labor and Delivery once more. They told me to close my eyes, but that wouldn’t have helped much. Let me tell you, motion sickness mixed with the effects of dilaudid make for a horrible experience.  Unfortunately, even with the dilaudid, it didn’t feel like the pain was going away at all. Eventually I asked for an epidural and got it. By the time the anesthesiologist made it to my room and finally got everything settled, I was pretty much in a constant state of pain. The poor nurse that was helping me, gods bless her. I had to lean over, but I couldn’t move, I held tightly onto this woman and even though I was being jabbed with a needle in my back, I didn’t feel it. I screamed in this poor woman’s ear because I was in that much pain from everything else.

It took something like 15 minutes for the epidural to finally kick in, but when it did it was fantastic. The nurse got me settled back into the bed and told me it was time to try and get some sleep for a little bit. Sure enough, I was falling asleep fast. However, because nothing is easy in this story, every time I started falling into sleep, it seems that I stopped breathing and my oxygen level would drop. I ended up waking myself up several times before they figure out what was going on and the nurse put me on oxygen and I was alright in that regard.

Through everything still, I could almost feel the bleeding that was going on below; I couldn’t lift my head or anything to check it out, because it was just too heavy, but I could feel it. And it was confirmed when my mom finally showed up, after driving for something like sixteen hours, and I remember her saying something about there being a lot of blood. I can only imagine that it scared her to see the crisp white blankets soaking up the blood.

Within ten to fifteen minutes of my mom showing up, the doctor and nurse came back in to check on how everything was going with me and Talia. That’s when I heard the words that I had prayed to each and every god and goddess I could think of to not hear for a long time.

‘I need you to give us a push’

And that was all it took; one push, after essentially five days of labor, and our daughter, our Talia, came into the world in silence at 11:46pm on June 4^th, 2019. The few seconds that they took down there felt like forever, but eventually they asked John if they wanted to cut the cord. I remember they said they didn’t but I talked them into doing it. I told them that if they didn’t, it might be something that they regret down the line. And I didn’t want them missing out on anything that parent would do in a normal situation. Once they cut the umbilical cord, they placed her right on my chest.

My daughter lived and died in my arms, on my chest. I held her as she struggled to try and take a breath that her lungs weren’t formed enough to take; it wasn’t more than a minute.

We got to hold her, kiss her and love on her before the nurse asked if they could take her away just long enough to take pictures for us and to get all the information that any normal parent would get. Birth weight, length, footprints and hand prints. They even took a cast of her feet for us.

When they brought her back in, she was lovingly wrapped in what once was a piece of someone’s wedding gown and a pink blanket around that. She also had an adorable pink hat on. And they gave her back to us; handling her with so much care, more than I can ever thank them for. They took some pictures while we all held her and loved her, and then they gave us some time alone with her before they were going to bring us all back to the high risk room. Going to get us a cuddle cot so that she could stay with us for as long as we wanted to keep her.

I remember taking every bit of her in and being in awe of how absolutely beautiful she is; I say is, because I can’t use the past tense when it comes to our Talia.

She has the cutest of button noses that she got from me. She has the longest fingers and toes as well as a full head of little hairs, which she got from John, her Adda.

I counted every digit and, while everyone was gathering things to be moved again, I sang to her. I sang the only song that came to mind at that moment. ‘Into the West’.

John held her, whispered to her and gave her kisses. My mom got to hold her too, also giving her kisses and talking to her. When we were ready to head back to our room in High Risk, my mom went to her hotel room to get some sleep. Talia was placed back in my arms and they wheeled us back to our room after mom went out. They set up the cuddle cot, a moses basket with a cooling pad within it to allow her to stay with us for as long as we wanted, and then they left us be for a few hours. We each held her, we gave her kisses and loved on her and just held her close before we finally managed to allow ourselves to tuck her into the cot for the night.

I didn’t sleep much, I know that. I kept waking up and checking on her, making sure she was still there with us, and the few times I did manage to get to sleep I was woken by nurses coming into the room to check on us.

Once the sun came up, once morning broke, we were both up and Talia was back in our arms. My mother came to visit again and she got to hold Talia some more, love her some more, and our friend Chrissy came as well and got to hold and love her. Eventually Chrissy had to go back home for work and my mom had to head back to the hotel, leaving John and I alone with our little girl for a little longer. The quiet was what we needed, just the peace to be there, all three of us, and to just feel everything we needed to feel. Cry, sob, be angry, everything.

One nurse did come in at one point while the three of us were alone and that moment was the only one bad moment we had with anyone on the hospital staff. She came in and saw the three of us on the couch, just curled up together, and she actually said ‘I know, it’s like you keep looking at her and are waiting for her to just take a breath’. In that one moment, I was enraged and absolutely shocked into silence. Just because we had been thinking it, doesn’t mean it was alright for her to say it to us. John and I were both too shocked to actually say anything before she was out of the room again.

We had decided to leave the hospital by the end of day that day; we could have stayed for as long as we wanted and had as much time as we wanted with her, but we knew that we couldn’t. So, just after five in the afternoon, we told the nurses and the grief counselor there that we were ready to leave. The nurses brought in the small box that they had put together for us; that box contained every single thing that Talia had touched since coming into the world. And the grief counselor came in and changed Talia over to a hospital receiving blanket so that we could also take the blankets and hat that she had worn also. And then she gathered our beautiful, perfect Talia into her arms with care and carried her out of the room.

That was the last that time we ever saw her like that.

We left that hospital without our little girl and it was quite possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. On the walk out there were so many times when I almost turned around to run back into that hospital and demand to have my daughter back, it was only sheer will that kept me from actually doing that.

The drive home was torture, but we did it. And not a day, not even a moment goes by now where I don't think about her. Our beautiful Talia Aoife-Grace.