My husband and I were married in September of 2018, and decided to start our journey to grow our family in 2020. After struggling with infertility for several months, I received a surgery to aid in our ttc journey. Immediately after, we conceived our first child in June of 2021. The pregnancy was challenging, as I dealt with extreme morning sickness and then experienced my first large bleed at 10 weeks and 6 days gestation. We were diagnosed with a subchorionic hematoma at this point, and I continued to bleed the remainder of the pregnancy. At 16 weeks and 5 days we had our first appointment with a maternal fetal medicine specialist, and at this point were told that we had a less than 50% chance of reaching viability due to the constant bleeding and the large size of the hematoma. We went home, and I went into labor Friday night (although we did not know at the time that it was labor). We ended up going to the ER due to the amount of pain that I was in early Sunday morning, and I gave birth to our sweet baby girl, Nora Marjorie Lyons, at 3:40am on October 3rd, 2021 at 17 weeks and 2 days gestation. She was measuring a few weeks ahead, and was so perfectly formed. We experienced a significant amount of medical trauma due to the events that unfolded, and were thrown into grief.
We began ttc again in January 2022, anticipating the journey to take a while, but were blessed with an immediate positive pregnancy test that month. We knew of our Baby Bean for 1 week before we experienced an early miscarriage. Since then, we have been unable to conceive and recently began our journey with a fertility clinic in August 2022.
Throughout this experience , I have been blessed with several other loss parents sharing their stories with us, and have come to realize the sacred beauty in sharing your story of loss with others. A fellow loss mom told me that the desire to parent does not simply go away when our baby dies, and I feel that my desire to parent is being expressed via writing and advocacy. I hope that the blogs I post impact you in some way, whether you are a fellow loss parent who can feel less alone, a person who has not experienced pregnancy loss who can understand a bit more about the experience, or a family member trying to navigate how to best support your loved one through this journey of loss. We also pray that this site can lead to continued advocacy and awareness for the experience of perinatal loss.