From Broken to Beautiful, Part 1

The story of how God took a shattered life and made it beautiful again

“I didn’t know they made coffins that small.”

My husband and I, weary from the last week of fighting by our 5 month old’s bedside, sat in the back of a large church. On the stage, beautifully set up with trees, was a tiny little white coffin, holding the 22-hour-old son of some of our closest friends at the time.

“Neither did I,” my husband replied.

I turned to my husband. “I wouldn’t be able to survive if we had to plan our baby’s funeral.”

“I know,” was his quiet reply.

The service was beautiful, full of worship music and a message from the pastor, who was also the baby’s grandfather. Jude Samuel, a sweet baby with a condition similar to Judah’s, had lived for 22 hours. His lungs weren’t developed enough.

We drove back to the hospital, mostly quiet. We were anxious to see Judah again. On the drive to the funeral, we received a call from his care team saying they thought he was having seizures. But permanently stuck in my mind was the sight of that tiny coffin. And the feeling in the pit of my stomach that this wasn’t the last time I would see one.

My journey even to that moment was long and hard.

I grew up in a home with abusive parents. We never had enough money. Or food. Or clothes. Somehow, when we didn’t know what we would eat next, boxes of food would show up on our porch. When we didn’t know where our next pair of shoes or clothes would come from, we’d come home to bags of them on our porch.

Eventually, we moved out of that little yellow house on a country road after my parents divorced. We were split up among families in the church and eventually, all moved back in with my mom and her then-boyfriend.

That boyfriend became my stepdad and the only father figure I’ve ever known. I was a teenager at that point, full of dreams of becoming a writer, a missionary, or a nurse and doing big, important things.

I thought it was my calling to become a nurse after going on a missions trip during my freshman year of high school. And so I pursued it all through high school and then into college. All the while, I was building a friendship with a tall, skinny boy who loved writing as much as me and respected me more than anyone ever had.

When I was 18, I started dating that boy after knowing him for 6 years. A year and a half later, we were married and I thought nothing could go wrong.

I was so, so wrong.

We got sick on our honeymoon. We came home and then started a three-day road trip from my hometown to Texas where my husband, Brendan, now lived and worked. We moved my things into his tiny one-bedroom apartment in 110-degree heat. And I found out that I hated Texas.

I was having trouble getting my college credits to transfer. The traffic was insane, and I was terrified to drive on the freeways. The whole city was bigger than my home state. And worst of all, everything came crashing down on me, years of abuse and neglect, and I found myself spiraling into deep depression and anxiety.

My sweet husband never wavered. He stayed with me. He did his best to help me. He got me a dog to be with me during the day while he was at work even though he didn’t really like dogs. Slowly, things started looking a little better.

And then I started to feel sick and run down all the time.

My first thought was that I could be pregnant. I took a test. It was negative. The days went on with no real explanation as to why I was feeling horrible. Every time I would take another test, it was negative again.

In the meantime, we moved across the city to a bigger apartment closer to my college. We bought furniture and tried to settle in. I still felt sick.

Finally, fed up with all the negative tests and feeling awful, I went to the doctor. I’ll never forget the giant smile on the doctor’s face - a petite Asian woman - when she came in the door and proclaimed, “Congratulations, honey! You’re pregnant!”

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. There was no way. But there it was - a positive test.

I was sent next door to schedule my first OB-GYN appointment. Three weeks from that day.

I told my husband. We were both in shock. But slowly the shock wore off and I began to feel excited. I bought prenatal vitamins. I felt nauseous. I was carrying a tiny little life in my belly.

That was, until I wasn’t.

On August 22, 2013, my world came crashing down. I started bleeding.

Panicked, I called my mom. She told me to go to the ER. My husband was already at work so I drove myself, crying and begging God to let my baby be okay.

Several hours and an ultrasound during which the screen was turned away later, I was told I was having a miscarriage. Just like that, it was over. Other than some vague instructions and warnings, I was just sent home.

We named our baby, who we felt was a boy, Jack, based on a running joke we had going about Jack Sparrow. My depression grew deeper and I mostly just stayed inside, holding my dog, watching TV and drowning out the world around me.

For the next 2.5 years we fought a battle no one knew about because it felt shameful to say it.

It felt shameful to say I’d had a miscarriage. Only a few people knew. And when we decided we wanted to try again, we found ourselves battling infertility for 2.5 years. There were tests but no answers. No one knew why. We were stuck in “unexplained infertility”.

In the meantime, I tried everything I could. I dieted, exercised, took supplements, worked with a functional doctor, and read everything I could about getting pregnant. Nothing worked.

The world around us moved on. I kept going to school and was eventually accepted into a nursing program. We made friends, we built a life, and we found a church we loved, but still, no one knew. No one around us was even thinking about having babies yet, so why would we bring it up?

And then in January of 2016, deep in the trenches of nursing school, I started to feel exhausted.

And not just regular exhaustion but the kind of exhaustion that nothing could fix. I would take 5 shots of espresso in my coffee each morning. The barista would look at me like I was crazy. I thought it was just the intense study hours and class hours combined with 12-hour hospital clincals.

But, just to be safe, I took a test. And in February of 2016, I was finally greeted with 2 pink lines at the worst possible time.

We had just chosen a few months before not to start fertility treatments for another year so I could finish school. With nursing school, you can’t take a semester off. You have to keep going or drop out. I wanted to finish and not have to go back to school a few days after having a baby, so we decided to wait.

And finally, God showed up and gave us the gift of a baby. I was over the moon but terrified about what it meant. I was due to graduate in December but due to give birth in October.

We had another miscarriage scare a few weeks later - but this time the ultrasound tech said the most beautiful words - “I’m going to turn the screen around so you can see. There will be a little flickering - that’s your baby’s heartbeat.”

She turned the screen and there it was - a beautiful beating heart that we never got to see with Jack. She also found large bleeds on either side of the baby so I was put on bedrest. It meant I had to drop out of nursing school but I didn’t care. I was carrying our miracle baby and that was all that mattered.

Weeks turned into months. Our baby grew. I dealt with extreme morning sickness called hyperemesis gravidarum. I could barely eat or move off the couch some days. And still our baby grew.

We found out we were having a boy in the beginning of May. I was disappointed not to have a girl but eventually accepted the idea. At the end of May, we had some blood drawn to test for spina bifida.

We were in Georgia visiting my in-laws when we got a call - our son’s test had come back as high risk for spina bifida.

We were referred to a maternal-fetal specialist for our anatomy scan and told we would have to speak with a genetic counselor first.

To our surprise, the MFM turned out to be a friend of ours who practiced under her maiden name. We spoke with the genetic counselor who assured us that false positives were common, especially with the bleeds I’d had early in the pregnancy. She didn’t think there was anything wrong after going over our history.

So we went into the scan, excited to see our baby and doubtful that there was anything wrong. The ultrasound tech was mostly quiet except when asking me to change positions - he said the baby was in my hip and it was hard to get the images he needed.

He quietly finished up and then went and got our doctor. She came in the room with a solemn look on her face.

“I am so sorry,” she said, “I don’t think your baby has any kidneys.”

We were stunned. We didn’t know something like this was possible. I don’t remember much else from the appointment aside from her explaining that our baby would most likely be stillborn, that there was no treatment, and her and her husband praying over us. She had noted something kidney-shaped in his abdomen but couldn’t tell what it was. She thought it could be a kidney and the problem could potentially be with my placenta. She sent me home on bedrest again, told me to drink as much water as I could and to come back in two weeks to check again and see if we could confirm what the problem was. And so began some of the longest weeks and months of my life.

This story is long so I’ll be breaking it up into parts. Make sure to subscribe for part 2.

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