Anyone who stumbles upon this blog, I’m assuming, will want to read the story of what happened…

Thus, I’ve attempted to write my story twice now. It’s 3/4 done, and already far past the ideal blog post length (I’m anal like that and researched it – generally should stay ~1,600 words, or seven minutes of reading time). So I need to finish it, and then condense it. But every single time I get to the more traumatic part, I start sobbing, and I don’t finish it.

So here’s the short version – the one I’d say in my brief intro at our monthly support group meetings…

On Monday, July 13, 2015 we lost our first child, our son, Matthew. I was almost 33 weeks pregnant. Up until that point my pregnancy had been easy and healthy. On Sunday night I noticed decreased fetal movement, so we headed to the hospital. They found his heartbeat right away, but after noticing some concerning variable decelerations, they decided to keep me overnight. His heartbeat was fine throughout the night – only mildly worrisome.

But ~6:00am Monday morning, when I sat up in bed, his heartbeat disappeared. They performed an emergency C-section and had him out within 10 minutes. Matthew was born with a heartbeat of about 50, but he could not be resuscitated. He was 5lbs, 8ozs, and 18” long, and totally healthy and beautiful. He died from a true knot in his umbilical cord + two nuchal wraps. He ran out of cord and cinched the knot, resulting in his oxygen being cut-off.

We love Matthew so much and miss him every single day. Things have been really hard ever since.

So that was my support group 30 second commercial. Stay tuned for the long version of the story.