The Beginning of Wynnie
If you’ve followed our story long enough, you watched us struggle in the beginning of growing our family. We tried for 2 years to have a baby before we finally got pregnant with Madeleine and in that time, we lost 2 precious little babies. It was one of the darkest seasons I’ve ever experienced. It’s the reason my prayer after having Madeleine was that our next baby would come “by accident“ and it’s also the reason I honestly couldn’t even fathom what that would be like. The idea of “just getting pregnant” – without planning and tracking and testing and begging – was not something I could imagine. So when I started waking up in a sweat when Madeleine was 5 months old, I thought it was just a new postpartum symptom until I remembered back to trying to get pregnant. When you get pregnant, your body temp raises higher than normal while you sleep and it stays up. So one morning after a few days of that, I thought “there’s no way” but I decided to use one of the tests I had left from before Lena and, sure enough, I found myself looking at a very unquestionable second line. I was shocked and a bit terrified because Lena’s pregnancy was very difficult on me and I couldn’t imagine doing that with an infant. I got ready for the day, I woke Lena up and as I dressed my infant daughter who couldn’t even sit up by herself yet, Justin got home from his morning hunt. I walked out of Lena’s room and handed him his 5 month old daughter and a positive pregnancy test. He was ecstatic and said something like “we get to have another one!? Yes!” We ordered a Big Sister onesie for Lena and planned to tell our families the next weekend once it came in.
The next Saturday, I woke up feeling AWFUL and had a one sided pain that was getting worse very quickly. As Justin got home from night shift, I told him to call his mom to come over for Lena so we could go to the ER. Instead of the fun announcements we had planned, he called our parents to say “Catie’s pregnant again and something’s wrong. Can you come over so we can go to the hospital?” It wasn’t the first time they’d received that call as a pregnancy announcement from us and it sounded all too familiar to me. He brought Lena to me so I could nurse her before we left and then helped me into clothes and into the car. I had one sided pain that was extremely intense – I had labored through an induction gone wrong just a few months before this and it hurt almost as bad. I couldn’t stand or walk and was using labor breathing techniques to handle it as we drove to the ER. He called so they could be ready with a wheelchair when we got there. I prayed the whole way there that the Lord would let me keep this baby. As I prayed this, I prepared myself that Lena was going to be our only child because I thought I was having an ectopic pregnancy and they were going to have to take all my parts out. There was no way I was in that much pain without something being very wrong. It was a miserable ER visit. They wouldn’t let me have even water thinking I would likely end up in surgery. They ran all the tests and finally did an ultrasound. What they found was a small, very normal ovarian cyst on the side that didn’t have pain and a gestational sac exactly where it belonged in my uterus. They kept me there on fluids until the pain was tolerable and sent me home with a recommendation to take Tylenol through the weekend. I was sore for a couple days and then nothing else ever came of that. I believe when we left that morning, there was something very wrong and I firmly believe the Lord answered my prayer while we waited for that ultrasound room to be ready. A couple weeks later we followed up with my OB and got another ultrasound that showed a healthy little heartbeat.
