Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Something really important

I love this blog. It's great fun coming here to talk about religion and politics and baseball and LOST and all kinds of other things. ExPat has been a dear friend of mine for over six years now and I am truly honored he asked me to be part of this and I find myself challenged and intrigued by his postings - as well as Mo-Lak's and certainly by the many terrific comments and responses from people who thankfully take the time to read and reply to our blog here. But today I'm just sharing about myself - no politics, no baseball, no media (but a lot of God).

I'm married to the most wonderful woman in the world. We've been married for about 7.25 years now. She's my best friend, my perfect compliment, my number one fan, and the best person I've ever been blessed to know. About two and a half years we felt the call from God to start a family. Okay, I did - she felt it quite a bit earlier but respected that I had not yet. So we started preparing and then started trying. It took one shot. We were pregnant and ecstatic.

As I've shared before in here, it didn't end up going well. We miscarried when we were at about 11 weeks. It was the worst day of both of our lives. It tested us spiritually and emotionally and relationally. We spent times almost avoiding each other to try to protect the other and times where we completely leaned on each other. We spent times coming very close to blaming God and LOTS of time completely relying on Him. But we came through it stronger and closer and still very confident that God wanted us to have a family.

But for the better part of the next two years my wife had LOTS of physical problems with that. The hormones from an uncompleted pregnancy reeked havoc on her cycle and it took lots of doctor visits and trying various approaches to get things back to normal to where we could actually even be trying again. But this past June we finally did reach that point.

And in August we were successful (you may recall I wasn't participating much on here that month ). We were so far beyond joyful that it truly does not have words to accurately describe it. But at the same time we were also faced for the first time the real fear of losing the baby again. Still, through the whole process we've learned what it really means to be putting all your trust completely on God's shoulders, so we kept doing that whenever those worries came up.

Just over two weeks ago, my wife called my classroom to tell me she was home because she had been passing out at work. I ran home and took her to the ER. She ended up passing out a total of six times that day. The baby was okay, but they decided she must have had a burst ovarian cyst and the blood from that irritated her abdominal wall, which caused the intense pain and that caused the passing out. She was put on bed rest and told her body would heal it up naturally with time and rest.

A week ago we went in for a regularly scheduled appointment. The baby still looked good, but what they thought was the burst cyst now didn't look like anything on the ultrasound they could really tell. So they went straight to surgery. Turns out it was not a burst cyst at all. Instead it was a ruptured ectopic pregnancy . Apparently she had released two eggs and one did what it was supposed to, but the other got stuck in the tube. They tell us this happens in 1 out of 10,000 pregnancies. They also say that 1 in 2,000 women die from this every year in the U.S. - and I'm sure that only goes up when you consider what happens when they don't diagnose it until nine days after it ruptures.

But by the grace of God the internal bleeding had "somehow" slowed down to where it practically stopped inside of her before the surgery and the surgery took care of of cleaning it out and all the painful blood. It did cost her one of the tubes, but that's obviously a small price to pay. She is healing well and will be getting about three more weeks of vacation from her job to recover.

Yesterday we went in to the doctor for the follow up. Due to the bleeding and the location of the incision we had to wait this long after the surgery to do another ultrasound to see how the healthy baby made it through the surgery. Here is the best picture I've seen in a long time:



That's our baby. Right as he/she was dancing around and showing off their good size and good heart rate and hands and feet and head (and butt up in the air). I'm so blessed and happy and lucky and overjoyed. And today I couldn't think of anything about politics or sports or entertainment or any of that which felt like it was worth talking about when I had this to share. Thanks for indulging me - and thanks to God above all else for blessing me and my family in ways that only He could.

posted by gurufrisbee @ 3:50 AM

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