When I tell people that my profession is a birthing room
nurse, the response is always something like "Oh you get to work in the
happy place!" for the most part, this is true. I am honoured to be part of
the most joyous days of parents lives; life changing, life memorable days.
However, being the Capricorn personality that I am, I work in the area where
there is no grey: I am part of the very best and the very worst parts of
peoples lives. Yes, when everything goes well, it is the very best. But then,
there is the very dark, very bleak part of my job: helping a woman bring into
the world a baby that will never take its first breath. It doesn't happen very
often, but when it does, it sheds a pall on the entire unit; none of us go
untouched, no matter who is the actual nurse caring for the family.
I have attended over 10,000 births in my long career. As you
can imagine, I have difficulty remembering a handful of them. But, I can
describe in detail every stillbirth I ever delivered. At my first one, I
learned why they are deemed a "stillbirth." after all, there are many
more medical, more appropriate names. But like so many parts of working in
childbirth, the history of the art comes into play. A birth is joyous, loud,
noisy, filled with laughter, tears, and baby cries. We shout out: its a boy or
its a girl. Mothers and fathers are weeping tears of joy with laughter, and I
love yous. The physicians are busy telling us to do the things we have done a
thousand times, but still, need to be said out loud. We are chatting about our
own lives and our own family experiences and welcoming this wrinkled, red, new
citizen into our world.
A stillbirth is just that: still. No one says a word, we
move slowly, not quickly and silently, moving with a slow rhythm, as if trying
not to alert the mother that her child is here and will not ever really be here.
No orders are said because they are not needed; no chatter, no laughter, just
the silent weeping of a heartbroken father, the stream of tears from our
sympathetic hearts and the clicking of the hospital clock.
The one sound that breaks the stillness is spine chilling. It
is the bitter wailing of a mother, that will never mother this child and a
woman, who until the very moment that the baby was born without life, was so
sure we were wrong and that this life she had nurtured inside her was still
there. When the baby slips from her limp, and still, she knows the horrible
truth. This baby will never go home, never grow live. The medical people were
right all along: this baby is gone.
That wail, that cry that the mother gives is primal,
something from long ago, lost from our civilized consciousness, yet still
hidden deep within our soul. It is truly the sound of the heartbreaking.
We overuse that expression in our modern world
"heartbroken," but until you have heard a woman's heart shattering
into pieces over the loss of her baby, it is meaningless. All of the pretenses
and crocodile tears of our modern society fall away amid that sound.
When I was young and starting my career, I was so naive. I
did not understand why we would spend so much time and effort with parents who
had lost a child rather that being with the ones whose child was being born. There
is a long protocol to follow, with things that some people would consider
morbid, trying to get some kind of memento for the parents, such as a lock of
hair or foot and handprints.
It is amazing to me now that I could have ever, ever been so
stupid. But I was young and extremely pragmatic, and most of all, I had not
raised Connor.
Then in one of those light bulb moments that Oprah talks
about, I learned something that would forever change my thinking. A perinatal
bereavement instructor shared with us this thought : When you have a child, you
have a lifetime of memories to look forward to, growing, first steps, first day
of school, etc. when there is a stillbirth, those moments, those hours are the
only memories that those parents will ever have of that child. It is not their
fault that their child never took a breath and will never grow. That baby will
always be their child, and as Nurses, it is our job to make sure they have as
many memories as possible to take with them.
That small thought changed everything and how I now approach
my care, trying to give the parents as much as we can to take with them.
The parents often want to know why? Why them? Why this baby?
Only very infrequently can we tell why a baby that survived so much just to
come into existence would perish so close to its birthday? If we can tell that
it was something like a cord around them or a bleed, it rarely makes a
difference. No matter what the reason, their baby is still gone.
Grandparents are notorious for wanting to know why. Sometimes, I believe that
it is so they will have someone to blame, sometimes I think that it is just
something they say because they do not know what else to say.
I have heard the heartbroken wail another time in my life. It
was when the doctor told us that Connor would never walk or stand on his own.
Max was devastated, and his cry was heart-wrenching. I think most people
assumed it was because he was disappointed for himself; after all, he comes
from a family where success is based on your physical ability. It wasn't that. He
was mourning the loss of the son we thought we had while trying to process the
son we now had; and Max being Max, was feeling "bad" for all the
things that Connor would be missing out on, never imagining what this new road
would bring us too. And as with the stillbirth family, everyone wanted to know
why? What caused this? Why Connor.
Elsie (my mother) was particularly relentless in her pursuit
in trying to find an answer to the why? Part of me thinks it because she wanted
to blame me--after all, I was the last one who was there!--part of me thinks
she was planning on using my physician, something Max and I dismissed very
early on.
I can tell you that knowing why never solves the problem and
sometimes introduces a whole other set of problems into your life. The peace
that I finally got on the why me question came from a colleague who had a child
with a severe genetic disorder; she passed away at age three. I finally got up
the nerve one night shift to ask her a question that had been burning in my
mind, "Rita, did you ever ask, Why me God" her answer was simple and
blissful, "No, Linda, I didn't, I just figured, Why not me? What makes me
so special?" there it was--Why not us? We were loving, caring, and Connor
was our son. Looking back, we were the perfect choice of whatever power decides
these things-- fate, Karma, God, the universe--after all, we had been together
for many years, I was a nurse with pediatric background and training and Max
was a weightlifter with a soft heart. Why not us? And truly would know why
Connor was the way he was, why he had cerebral palsy changed anything? There is
no cure; there are all the same treatments regardless of why the cerebral palsy
occurred, and sitting around knowing could lead to bitterness and stagnation. The
last thing Connor needed to succeed in the world was a set of bitter and
stagnant parents. And as light bulb moments happen, I know now that it was
meant to be. Things do happen for a reason; they are not always happy reasons
but for reasons nonetheless. If we hadn't been Connors parents, who know what
life we would have had. If we hadn't raised him there would be wonderful people
missing from our lives; I am not even sure we would still be together as it
would have been easy to quit our marriage if not for the shared care of our
wonderful sons. And I am very happy that it turned out this way. As I told my
sister in law this week, I would not change a thing, and I would not have
missed it for the world.
I know that in the moments of grief and heart-wrenching pain,
it is so hard to think past it, but things do happen for a reason, and there
are no mistakes. For the mothers who lost babies, they will never take a single
breath their next child takes for granted, they will never push away from a
hug, or not stop what they are doing to listen to their toddler babble or their
teenager rant. Sometimes, that reason has to be enough.
