stillbirth

This is the stillbirth story of George Robert, told by his mom Miranda. Originally from Canada, Miranda and her husband Graham have been living in London for work, and they made the decision to start trying to have a baby. She talks about her pregnancy and “going to” appointments (telemedicine) and how George was progressing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After feeling no movement from George one morning around 39 weeks, Miranda headed to the hospital to be checked. They couldn’t find a heartbeat, and Miranda gave birth to George the following day. She and Graham did not want to see George after he was born, and with some encouragement from their bereavement midwife, they both did see him and spent time with him. This is George’s story.

Watch here (YouTube):

Listen here (podcast):

Time Stamps:

00:00 George Robert
02:21 Introduction of Miranda and Graham
09:01 Pregnancy
19:10 Something is wrong and going to the hospital
30:09 Birth
36:26 After birth
41:17 Leaving the hospital
45:50 Funeral
55:04 Autopsy

You might appreciate these other episodes:

• Watch/listen to Miranda‘s advice episode of son George: Click here
• Watch/listen to Tiffany‘s birth episode of daughter Khyana’s: Click here

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Full Transcription:

Miranda Markham  0:00  

My baby’s name was George Robert.

Miranda Markham  0:08  

Things I remember about him most of all. The first was that throughout the entire pregnancy, I was absolutely convinced he would be blonde like me. I don’t know why it’s the recessive gene. My husband and I have dark brown hair, but I just assumed 100% he’d be blonde. He was born with a full head of dark brown hair, which surprised me. The other thing was that leading up to his birth, the weather was unseasonably warm, beautiful sunny days, pure blue skies every day for what seemed like weeks on end. Then he died five days before his due date. On his due day, the sixth of June, the weather absolutely turned, it got really cold. There was a thunderstorm. I do remember sitting and staring out the window and watching the rain pour down and just think this is so perfect. I couldn’t stand a happy, sunny day on what was the saddest day for me. I just felt like the world was grieving with me somehow. I don’t know, it felt like a very fitting weather turn to mark what should have been a very joyful day.

Winter  1:21  

Welcome to Still A Part of Us. A place where moms and dads share the story of their child who was stillborn or who died in infancy. I’m Winter.

Lee  1:28  

And I’m Lee, we are grateful you joined us today. Please note that this is a story of loss and has triggers.

Winter  1:34  

Thanks to our lost parents who are willing to be vulnerable and share their children with us. 

Lee  1:38  

If you’re listening to this podcast, just know that on our YouTube channel, there are pictures and videos that are related to the stories that are being shared.

Winter  1:45  

Subscribe and share it with a friend that might need it and tell them to subscribe. Why? Because people need to know that even though our babies are no longer with us. They’re Still A Part of Us.

Winter  1:58  

We are so grateful to have Miranda on with us today to talk about her son, George. This is actually kind of a fun experience to get to know Miranda. So I’m excited to have you on today. Miranda, welcome. 

Miranda Markham  2:10  

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. 

Winter  2:12  

So tell us a little bit about yourself, Miranda. Who you’re married to, where you guys are living right now, and what do you do on a day to day basis?

Miranda Markham  2:21  

Yeah, sure. So my husband’s name is Graham. We just celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary on the 13th of April. 

Winter  2:29  

Congratulations.

Miranda Markham  2:31  

16th of April. It was in 2013. We are originally from Canada. We moved to London, England six years ago, both of us had job opportunities that came up around the same time. It was not in our life plan. We had just got married, we just bought a house and lived in that house for approximately a year. It was very much the plan to stay in Toronto, where we lived. We just kind of packed it all up and fled with the intention of staying in London for two years. That was six years ago. 

Miranda Markham  3:15  

We both changed jobs a couple times since moving to London. But broadly, my role has been in the world of public relations. I’ve worked in all sorts. Started in consumer PR, so for large consumer businesses and then transitioned into health and fitness PR specifically, which is very much my area of expertise and my passion. My husband’s done a fairly significant career pivot after a career in mining. He went into an MBA program at the London Business School, and decided he wanted to get into the world of food tech, which is where he’s working now. So plant proteins and alternative meat. Yeah,

Winter  3:55  

Very interesting. So you guys have just found yourself in London. Do you enjoy living there? Has it been good for you?

Miranda Markham  4:04  

It’s been amazing. I think we wouldn’t have stayed, we wouldn’t have stayed for three times the length of time if it wasn’t. I think we were really naive when we first moved to London thinking that after two years, we would have done it all and seen it all. Done everything made all these friends and could have just packed up and moved to Toronto. I mean, I think it really took us two years to feel like we lived in London, and to make some solid friendships. By the time that had happened, it seemed like a shame to reverse it all. So we just stayed, but the city is amazing. I mean, there’s everything you have at food entertainment events. I think a big thing for us was proximity to the rest of Europe and an opportunity to travel extensively which we’ve done over the last six years.

Winter  4:51  

Which is so wonderful. You kind of alluded to this that you are very much into the– you do PR for a fitness company. I know that you are a big runner if I’m not mistaken. Tell me a little bit how long you’ve been running? Is that like a pretty big hobby for you?

Miranda Markham  5:12  

Running was a huge part of my life. I started running in my late 20s. A friend of mine was the leader of a local running club and basically invited me to come and join at a time where I never really put two feet in front of her. I really enjoyed it. So I kept going back. As part of the group she was in, they wanted two new runners to train for and run their first half marathon and blog about it in exchange for free clothes and shoes. So I thought, Yeah, why not? Why not? I had every intention of running one half marathon and saying that was what got my free shoes. I’m out of here. 

Miranda Markham  5:54  

Obviously, you know where the story goes. But I fell in love with it. I suddenly just awakened to this desire to see how far I could go. If I can do this, how much more can I run? How much faster can I get? How much further can I go? It was just this massive source of pride and accomplishment for me. So I continued, and over the last decade or so, less than a decade, I’ve run over 55 different races. All my two full marathons and five triathlons. I would say I’m still very much a recreational runner, but posted some times in the past a couple years that I would have thought inconceivable in my early days. So, I think there was something really rewarding about getting older and still being able to improve. 

Winter  6:45  

Yeah. 

Miranda Markham  6:46  

So I say it was a big part of my life. I think it’s sort of dropped down the priorities these days. But it’ll be there for when I want it back again.

Winter  6:55  

Yeah, exactly. That’s a nice thing about it. So it sounds like as a couple you guys like to travel. Any other things that you like to do in London or around?

Miranda Markham  7:08  

Definitely travel, but eat. Think of there’s no shortage of amazing cuisineI in London. I think it gets painted with a bad brush. People think that English food is just a bunch of fish and chips and fried stuff. I mean, if you want that you can have it. But it’s also a very worldly city where if you want any type of cuisine from anywhere around the world, you can get it. 

Winter  7:31  

Right. 

Miranda Markham  7:32  

So I think nights out with friends and enjoying great food. Either in their homes or at a restaurant has been a huge part of our social calendar. I think just the entertainment side of things. I mean, there’s aside from the obvious theaters, and kind of Western shows, there are just so many interesting events that you can go to. Whether it’s festivals or secret cinemas, or interactive art exhibits, I mean, it’s endless. You can find something to fill your weekend, every week, if you want.

Winter  8:02  

That is so fun. I think that is great. Thank you for letting us know. I think you’re technically our first international. Yeah, international guests. So welcome.

Miranda Markham  8:14  

Hey! All Right. 

Winter  8:15  

Yeah. For a little bit of context, can you also tell us how long ago George was born at the time of this recording? 

Miranda Markham  8:24  

It was coming up on 11 months ago.

Winter  8:29  

Yeah, it’s right. June.

Miranda Markham  8:31  

 So it was June, June of 2020. 

Winter  8:33  

Right. Okay. So it’s you and your husband, Graham, and any other members of the family? Just, it’s just the two of you. Right?

Miranda Markham  8:43  

It’s just us and the puppy who joined us in December of last year. 

Winter  8:48  

Okay.

Miranda Markham  8:48  

His name is Eddie.

Winter  8:50  

Wonderful. So were you guys planning on getting pregnant then? Was that part of the big picture? Or was that something that was a little bit of a surprise?

Miranda Markham  9:00  

It was not a surprise. I think we really, as a couple, I don’t want to say struggled, but certainly postponed the idea of starting a family for quite a long time. We like our lives. The freedom of being able to pack up and travel and do whatever we wanted when we wanted. It was really difficult for us to envision a life where that suddenly came to a standstill. 

Miranda Markham  9:29  

I think at the same time, both being very career focused. We were busy. It was hard to imagine how a baby would fit into our lives. So we really delayed our thinking around starting a family for quite a while. But I think we sort of have complete predictability. The second I turned 35 I suddenly felt like okay I’m ready now and we need to start. We need to start because obviously there’s no reason to believe that we would have any issues, and I wasn’t concerned about any fertility challenges. But I think age being a factor certainly weighed on my mind. It sort of felt like it was now or never. 

Miranda Markham  10:15  

I think the other thing was that I’m an only child. I always said my whole life that I would want to have two kids. So it was trying to plot that timeline. I’m a bit of a control freak. So trying to plan how that would look. Really sort of thought, okay, at 35, we’ve got to start the process. I think we took a very sort of laid back approach to it. It’s not like I was tracking anything, we just sort of, I don’t know if they say this and other countries that pulled the goalie, as they say. We just said, and just thought, if it happens, it happens. And that’s how it will be. 

Miranda Markham  10:53  

So it wasn’t a quick process, because, as it turns out, it’s really actually hard to make a baby. You spend your whole life worried that you’re gonna get pregnant by accident. And when it comes down to it, it’s like some Einstein level science experiment where the moon has to align with something or another. Anyway, it eventually happened. A month before my 36th birthday, I found out that I was pregnant. 

Winter  11:18  

Awesome. Were you guys excited? Was that just like, okay, we have been planning for this. How did you feel about that?

Miranda Markham  11:24  

I remember the day that I told Graham, I was pregnant. I did the test in the morning before work, and it was positive. I came and told him. We both kind of went, hmm, all right. Well, I gotta go. We’ll talk later. It was like the most anticlimactic thing there was no celebration, jumping up and down. It was kind of like, Okay, this is the thing we’ll deal with later. 

Winter  11:44  

Yeah. 

Miranda Markham  11:46  

So I wouldn’t say the initial emotion was one of overwhelming excitement. I think there was certainly happiness, but also an element of being terrified as well. This is suddenly everything is going to change. 

Winter  12:01  

Yeah. 

Miranda Markham  12:02  

So we could eventually talk about it. I think as time went on, I became more and more excited. But yeah, certainly it was scary. I think we were mostly focused on how our lives would change. 

Winter  12:15  

Yeah because it is a big change when a child comes into your life. How was the pregnancy? Were you? I would say that you are relatively fit. I’m just wondering how the pregnancy went. Morning sickness. How did the baby look?

Miranda Markham  12:32  

Yeah. I mean, overall, I would say my pregnancy was really smooth and really easy. I had really intense food aversions in the first trimester, which caught me a bit by surprise. I thought I knew about morning sickness, obviously I didn’t know that I would literally feel like rushing at the smell of my own refrigerator. I subsisted on a diet of bagels and crackers for probably 12 weeks. I also made hiding the pregnancy from people at that time extremely difficult knowing both my love of food and my high level of activity, when suddenly I started acting like a slob and eating nothing but carbs. It was a rather difficult thing so I’m sure most people had a suspicion before I ever mentioned this. 

Miranda Markham  13:24  

Otherwise, I think as soon as I passed the first trimester, I felt great. I had a high level of energy. I continued running until I was 25 weeks pregnant, I think. Carried on with a fairly high intensity fitness schedule. Group after five classes modified Of course. I also worked with a personal trainer who specialized in prenatal fitness, just to make sure that I was– I have a tendency to push myself too hard all the time. So I needed someone to kind of pull me back and make sure that I was still exercising safely. 

Winter  13:53  

Yeah.

Miranda Markham  13:54  

But yeah, and we still traveled. We went to Mauritius, when I was probably about 26 weeks, maybe 24 weeks pregnant, and had a luxurious holiday at this beautiful resort. Then in March of 2020, we went to France and my friends went skiing. I snowshoed and booked a massage therapist to come to the chalet and massage me. I mean it’s all very luxurious. 

Winter  14:20  

Yes, that sounds nice.

Miranda Markham  14:22  

Yeah, I didn’t have any issues. I was very mobile, very new. I felt good. I felt great. There were certainly no warning signs that anything would go badly. 

Winter  14:35  

Yeah. I am not totally sure how healthcare is in London or in the UK. But do they generally also do a kind of anatomy ultrasound around 20 weeks? Is that a fairly common practice still?

Miranda Markham  14:51  

Yes. So I think similar to most places, they do a 12 and 20 weeks again. My particular hospital also offered a third a six week scan, but due to COVID, it was canceled. So I never actually had that one. But I think potentially unlike other countries, I don’t know this for sure. But there’s lots of private care options where there’s several clinics that will do private scans for a fairly reasonable price. So if you are concerned, you can book what’s called a reassurance scan and go in and have another scan. Your cost, of course. 

Winter  15:24  

Right, right. 

Miranda Markham  15:26  

It’s certainly affordable, I think, for most people, and I think what’s the price of reassurance?

Winter  15:31  

Yeah, yeah. So you guys got your scans at 12 weeks and at 20 weeks. And how was George looking at that time at those times, looking good?

Miranda Markham  15:41  

He looks great. He was, I mean, it was, I think we totally took for granted at the time, but I went into all of those appointments, assuming that it would all be everything is fine. All graphs trending upward. Everything is perfect. So I always left feeling quite smug that everything was great. And therefore everything would be great. 

Winter  16:01  

Yeah. I know. So tell us a little bit. So you, just to kind of back up a little bit. I just want to point out that you had George, basically in the middle of the pandemic. It was probably full, like you guys had shut down? I mean, I think the UK had shut down quite a bit of stuff by June, May, June. 

Miranda Markham  16:20  

Yeah, so just to set the sort of timeline. I think I was entering my third trimester in March of 2020. 

Winter  16:29  

Okay. 

Miranda Markham  16:30  

So right when the world was basically pulling the panic alarm on COVID. I left work one afternoon of I think, March 17, or so. thinking it would be thinking it would be a couple of weeks, and I’d be back. It was the last time I was ever in the office.

Winter  16:49  

Right.

Miranda Markham  16:49  

I haven’t been back. Everything shut down. Like fully locked down after that. It was at first kind of a funny thing, a novelty. But it was this sort of bizarro world that everyone assumed would be temporary. And it was made bearable by the fact that the weather was beautiful. 

Miranda Markham  17:12  

Oh good. 

Miranda Markham  17:13  

I just thought, well, great. I’m working from home, I’m pregnant, I don’t have to get on public transit. I’m just going to lounge in the garden and drink 100 iced tea while in between meetings. 

Miranda Markham  17:25  

I don’t think initially, I was terribly concerned. I think when things started to become more concerning was when obviously hospitals became overrun. The NHS was at a breaking point in terms of being able to accommodate all the critical patients. Of course it wouldn’t have necessarily impacted maternity care. But what they did do in order to prevent more people from entering the hospital was to cancel what they called all non essential appointments. So for anyone like me, that was deemed low risk and healthy. 

Miranda Markham  18:03  

Pretty much all of my appointments, with the exception of one of 38 weeks was canceled, or done over the phone. Which I was deeply concerned about, at the time, because I thought, How on earth could they possibly know, if something’s going wrong with a phone call? I panicked. I remember calling multiple other hospitals to see if I could switch. But they all basically had the same rules in place. So there was no point. I kept trying to tell myself that they have to make changes in an unprecedented situation. So if they tell me that this is the right thing to do, and that the risk of going into the hospital is greater than staying home, then I have to just believe that that is in fact, true.

Winter  18:51  

So you have had basically telephone phone call, I mean, telephone appointments, and or none at all, basically, for your last trimester?

Miranda Markham  19:00  

Correct. 

Winter  19:01  

Were they having you do any sort of checks of, say blood pressure or? So nothing extra?

Miranda Markham  19:10  

No. So I think this is the other thing I thought normally they take blood or they check your urine, or they do your blood pressure, none of that was happening. They basically just asked how I was feeling. I think the question that stays with me is the midwife who called me and asked, Are you happy with the baby’s movements? And I thought, like, what an absolutely absurd thing to ask a first time mom, and I said, I don’t know what you mean. Like, yeah, like, give me more to go on. What should I be looking for? I remember her sounding quite exasperated with me, as if I was just wasting her time. And she just basically asked if the movements were regular. If I’d noticed any difference in the patterns and at the time, I just thought, I mean, I’m not paying attention. I was working 15-16 hour days because working in the fitness industry, when all of our clients that basically had to shut our business was in a tailspin. We were trying to save clients who were leaving us in droves. It was really stressful. The last thing I was paying attention to was counting my baby’s movements. So I just sort of said, Yeah, I guess so. And she said, Great, okay, call us if anything changes. The conversation lasted 45 seconds.

Winter  20:24  

So you’re in your third trimester, you are told to note down. I mean, it sounds like there was not very good direction given regarding what you’re supposed to be looking for in regards to movement. 

Miranda Markham  20:36  

Not particularly.

Winter  20:37  

Not particularly and they are and you are just kind of starting to get worried. Right. I mean, I would be, like you said,I would be panicking. 

Miranda Markham  20:47  

I panicked, I was properly panicked. And not just about the baby, but about all aspects of my life. What was going to happen with my company? What was happening? It sounds trivial now. But fitness was such a huge part of my life, and all the places I would go to fit and do classes were shut down there for the foreseeable. I mean even our families for travel, they live in Canada, they wanted to come visit us when the baby was born, would that be possible? 

Miranda Markham  21:15  

I remember, I was awake in the night, I couldn’t sleep because I was so worried about things. I woke up and I wrote, feverishly, six pages of worries. Months and months later, I went back and looked at those and it is shocking. How many of those things actually happened. Most people say when you write down your worries that most of them end up not coming to fruition. In his particular case, I would say 50% plus actually, indeed did happen. Which is a terrifying thing. 

Winter  21:45  

Yeah, it is. So tell me what happened. Yeah, tell me kind of what happened when you found out about George.

Miranda Markham  21:55  

I mean, things carried on through the third trimester. I did actually go to an appointment at 38 weeks, where everything appeared to be fine. So then I carried on working right up until the end. I worked until the 30th of May. I think that was the right day, 30 or something around there. 

Miranda Markham  22:15  

I remember being quite smug having done the best job I could, I was on great terms with my boss. We’ve done a lot of great work together in order to kind of salvage a lot of things that were going wrong. So we had a friend over that evening, and you’re having some food in the garden. I remember feeling quite smug. I could feel George moving around, and was feeling quite good about everything. 

Miranda Markham  22:40  

I woke up the next morning, I guess this was now June. June, the first, which was Monday, my very first day of maternity leave. I sat up in bed, and I just remember I normally every morning when I would sit up in bed, and I would have my morning drink, the baby would start moving. He’d start moving straight away. I start noticing his movements, especially if he could hear me or Graham talking. But this morning, there was nothing. I didn’t panic, not straight away, because I knew not to. I’d read enough by this stage on my own and based on my own research that you shouldn’t panic. 

Miranda Markham  23:17  

So I did everything that I was told to do. I had something cold to drink, I ate something sweet. I lay down on the couch, and I tried to feel if I could feel any movements. I still didn’t believe that there was anything too wrong. So I had a shower, dried my hair. By this point, more than an hour had gone by, and I still hadn’t felt anything. I thought I should just go in just to be sure. I’m sure it’s fine. But I’ll go in. I told Graham not to come even though I think he could have despite the COVID restrictions, but I told him not to go because in that moment, I was sure that everything would be okay. 

Miranda Markham  23:58  

I remember getting in. I just took an Uber to the hospital. I remember on the way there. I didn’t know just suddenly getting this increasing sense of dread. I even googled, I know I did this because like the web page was still open on my phone weeks and weeks later I googled rate of stillbirth. I just I don’t know, I just had a horrible dreadful feeling that something was wrong. I got to the maternity ward and they still had me wait, even though I said I was concerned about the baby’s movements. I still waited in the waiting room for 25 minutes before someone saw me.

Miranda Markham  24:36  

Then finally a midwife came and put the doppler on me and couldn’t find anything. That’s when I really started to panic. I kept shouting at her, is something wrong? Something is wrong and she just kept telling me that it was fine and not to worry. They brought in a different midwife and she checked and still nothing. 

Miranda Markham  24:53  

Then they told me to move and I had to go to a different area where they did a proper ultrasound with a more senior I don’t know if she was a midwife or an obstetrician, I’m not sure. That’s when she told me, well, she didn’t actually need to tell me. I just remember looking at her actually all three of them. There are three midwives there. They were all wearing masks because of COVID. I just looked at her eyes. They were filled up with tears. I knew before she even said anything. She just said the words I’m so sorry. I don’t know. I kept screaming at her. Are you sure? I demanded that she check again, over and over. She kept telling me that she was so sorry that he had no heartbeat. 

Miranda Markham  25:42  

After a few moments of trying to absorb this news, she told me that we had to go to a different room. I mean, understandably, I was hysterical. We’re separated by curtains in a room full of other pregnant women. Obviously, it’s not a good scene. I couldn’t function, I couldn’t move. Then I obviously had to call Graham, I had to call him, how do you call your husband and tell him that your baby’s dead? I’ve somehow managed to get through to him. I just shrieked something down the phone and then threw my phone at whoever was sitting or standing next to me and told them they had to sort it out. 

Miranda Markham  26:25  

So they took me to this other room. I remember sitting there just crying and asking, are they sure ? They kept telling me they could check again. But the woman who checked me is the most senior. I don’t know what her title is, a senior kind of ultrasound technician in the hospital and that if she had not seen a heartbeat, it was very unlikely that it would be any different. I remember I just kept asking what do we do now? What do I do? What do I do?

Miranda Markham  26:56  

They wouldn’t answer me forever, they just wouldn’t tell me anything, they wouldn’t speak to me other than just to sort of try to calm me like they wanted Graham to be there first. In hindsight, that was the right thing to do, because I don’t think I would have heard, or I would have heard, but I wouldn’t have listened to anything they said.

Miranda Markham  27:16  

Anyway, eventually he arrived. We talked about the different options, it is exceedingly difficult, in that moment of extreme shock to try and make rational decisions about what to do next. They give you the sort of doctor’s perspective of you can have a C-section or you can be induced, and they give you a bunch of various sort of sexual risks and benefits of each. But ultimately, it’s up to you to decide. And that’s horrible, because all I wanted in that moment was for somebody to tell me what to do. So to force me to make decisions like that, I think was cruel and horrible. And equally, I think the worst thing was that even once we decided, it’s not like it could happen immediately, we had to just go home. 

Miranda Markham  28:05  

At this stage, maybe 10 o’clock in the morning. We just had to go home to a house that had a baby’s room completely set up and ready for a baby that was never going to use it. And just sit with that fact for an entire day and night, that was the worst. I think people often say to me how awful they think certain things would have been like the funeral or packing up his room, or all these different things. But I think for me, that was the worst, having to turn around and leave the hospital and go home, and just be there with that. With that feeling completely helpless and out of control, and not able to do anything to help myself or the baby that had died. It was the worst 30 hours of my entire life.

Winter  29:01  

Did you guys decide to be induced or to have the C-section then?

Miranda Markham  29:07  

I think that if they had told me that I could have had the C-section immediately, I would have done it. Because I couldn’t imagine the idea of what I’ve just described as having to go home and just sit with that fact that they said regardless of what option I chose, it would have to be the following day. They had explained that the induction would be safer for me. An easier recovery and the safest option should we want to try and have children in the future. That seems like a good enough reason to me. So that was what we decided despite the fact that the thought of it was utterly inconceivable. But based on those facts alone, that’s what we decided.

Winter  29:53  

When Graham finally came, got there and everything, was he also in shock? I just imagine him getting the news on the other side of the phone. Do you know how he reacted?

Miranda Markham  30:09  

It’s really hard for me to remember because I was so in my own head, but I remember him running in. He had my hospital bag, I remember the one that I had packed for going to the hospital if I was in labor. I don’t know if he brought that out of his own accord, or if they told him to. He just ran in and hugged me. I don’t know if he cried, I can’t remember. He’s a very sort of practical and rational person. I think that in that moment, in those, especially that momentum, the many moments to follow, he really sort of assumed the role of sort of managing all practical things. Being the clear headed one that is going to deal with the sort of administrative and necessary parts of this. Because I couldn’t, I was incapable. So he asked all the questions and he listened to the answers. He knew where we had to go and when, because I just didn’t have the capacity to listen.

Winter  31:13  

So you guys stayed at your home for the day and for the night, and then went back to the hospital the next morning?

Miranda Markham  31:23  

Yes.

Winter  31:24  

It was obviously going to only be you and Graham that were able to come in. 

Miranda Markham  31:30  

Yeah, I think that was the only time certainly in the early days where I saw Graham panic. When we woke up the next morning we’re just sort of forcing ourselves to eat breakfast together. I think he just, I don’t know. I just remember him panicking, and he called our friend and told him what had happened. I don’t actually know what he asked him for. Now, I’m saying this, but I think he just needed it. I don’t know, he just needed to tell someone and to let them know that if he fell apart and needed help that somebody could help us. 

Miranda Markham  32:07  

But somehow we managed to choke down breakfast and call ourselves an Uber. I remember the Uber driver asked if I was in labor, absolutely the worst journey to the hospital ever. The worst part is that Uber driver actually lives in our area. So I see that van multiple times a week parking near our flat, even today. Every time I just shudder to think that was the vehicle that drove us to the hospital that day. 

Miranda Markham  32:39  

Anyway, yeah, so we got there sometime in the morning. I remember they brought us to, I guess, like a delivery suite or delivery room. Then we waited forever. We needed some additional, some kind of tablet to start the labor. We waited for it for four hours. I remember thinking like, how can this not be the hospital’s number one priority? Like, we’re just supposed to sit in this room and just do nothing, for four hours? They kept apologizing and they kept coming back being like we’re looking for the pharmacist, we’ll get it soon. I just thought like why would you have me come in at 9am or 8am. 

Miranda Markham  33:25  

Anyway, so eventually, we got the tablet that was required. Very thankfully, things progressed really quickly from there. It sounds weird to say, but I was so thankful to just start the process. Because I felt so helpless before, at least now there was something I could actively be doing. It meant that we were moving forward from this extremely painful state of limbo. 

Miranda Markham  33:29  

Once things started, they were quick, the entire labor was only three and a half hours. There were no complications at all. There was, I mean, I don’t even remember it being particularly painful. Other than emotionally painful. I didn’t have an epidural. I remember they sort of thrust this pamphlet of pain relief options at me and sort of had me decide which one I wanted to go with. All I can remember reading on the pamphlet was all these sort of vanishingly small risks associated with the different options for pain relief. I remember thinking to myself, well, I can’t have an epidural because I’ll probably be paralyzed. Like anything that was on there. I was just convinced that the risk would happen. So I just said, I don’t want any of it. 

Miranda Markham  34:09  

I ended up I don’t even remember what it’s called, but taking some kind of pain relief. It’s administered through the cannula like the intravenously I guess. With gas and air, I don’t think it was tremendously effective because it was one of these like self administered ones that you have to use. I had to press a button preemptively to every contraction and it’s like you’re not even, I don’t know who can do this effectively. So I would say it virtually didn’t work. Whether it worked or not, who knows. 

Miranda Markham  35:12  

Anyway, thankfully, everything was fast. George was born. I mean, that’s another horrible moment is the silence that followed that. I mean, they just whisked him away so fast. I remember I didn’t even see him. I was facing away sort of on my knees on the bed. George came out, and they just– by the time I’d turned around, he was gone. It was like he didn’t exist. Now, in hindsight, Graham tells me that they asked if I wanted to see him. He says that I’d said, No. I have zero recollection of that conversation ever happening. I trusted that it did happen. I probably just don’t remember due to some cocktail of emotions and drugs. 

Miranda Markham  35:58  

So I suppose they were doing what they thought I wanted. But it’s very weird to give birth to a baby and turn around and there’s just nothing. Nothing there. So yeah, and that was kind of it. It was kind of anticlimactic after that. I didn’t have any significant tearing. I think they put too little stitches. Then I took a shower and went to another room to recover.

Winter  36:23  

So you really did not see George at all?

Miranda Markham  36:26  

No.

Winter  36:26  

Not that day?

Miranda Markham  36:27  

Not that day.

Winter  36:28  

Okay.

Miranda Markham  36:32  

After that they eventually introduced me. I think the same day to a woman named Sarah, who was our bereavement midwife. She was amazing. She continued to encourage me to see George even though I was convinced I never wanted to. Eventually, not on the day he was born, he was born on June 2, on the third. 

Miranda Markham  36:59  

We were still in the hospital, they basically said, we can stay as long as I wanted, even though there was no real medical reason for me to be there. I didn’t know where to go. We didn’t know where to, we felt like we couldn’t go back to the flat. So we just sort of stayed until we could formulate a plan.

Miranda Markham  37:17  

Anyway, Sarah continued to give us the option to see George and encouraged us to do it. Graham eventually went to see him first. That was extremely hard for him, really emotional. I think he felt like at that time that he was doing that for both of us. And that I would never see him and that he felt like he needed to go and say something to our son on behalf of both of us. Eventually, Sarah suggested that I might like to look at some photos that they had taken of George first and see how that felt. 

Miranda Markham  37:50  

Again, at first I said no, that I couldn’t do it. So then on the morning of the fourth of June, we were still at the hospital. I remember I started feeling a bit jealous that Graham had seen George and I hadn’t, which I thought was an odd emotion even at the time, because I kept asking what did he look like? Did he look like this? Did he have this shape of nose? What color was his hair? What does his hand look like? And he’s just, I don’t know Miranda. It wasn’t on the top of his mind to strip the baby down and look at his, every crevice of his body. 

Miranda Markham  38:22  

I remember feeling jealous that he got that opportunity and I didn’t. So when Sarah came back, I said, I did want to see the photos. So she brought them in for me. I looked at them. I remember immediately I thought my reaction might be that I’d be scared or horrified. That he would look like a baby that he’d look like some horrible version of a baby. I was completely just like, took my breath away, just to see him that he just looked like the perfect sleeping Angel. I wasn’t scared of him at all. I was actually the emotion that I remember having overwhelmingly was that I felt proud. I felt proud of him. So right away I said I wanted to see him. That I needed to see him. 

Miranda Markham  39:25  

Two days later, after he was born, I finally saw him. They brought him into my room. Graham left because he couldn’t he couldn’t see him again. They brought him in this little thing they called a cold cot. A horrible little refrigerator instead of a nice warm bed. He still looked perfect. Like he literally looks like he could just start moving at any point.

Miranda Markham  39:54  

I remember asking what he was wearing because it didn’t occur to us to bring clothes to the hospital for a baby who had died. But he was wearing a little baby outfit and a hat. She said that there’s a woman who knits things for babies that have died. So he was wearing one of those hats and this little outfit that was too big for him. So I just spent some time with him. I held his little hand and I talked to him.

Miranda Markham  40:36  

I don’t know, even now I look back and think that it just wasn’t enough. I’m so grateful that I saw him at all because there was a long period of time where I wasn’t going to. I know deeply now that would have been such a huge source of regret for him. One of my biggest regrets now is that I didn’t hold him. I couldn’t at the time, I just like it just seemed inconceivable to me. But I just keep reminding myself that I did. I did the best I could at the time. 

Winter  41:08  

Yeah. So you left three days later, after he was born? Is that right?

Miranda Markham  41:17  

Yeah. So I think we left on the morning of the fifth of June. Again, we didn’t feel like we could go back to the flat. But while we were in the hospital, they were really kind to us. They fed us really well. And they were really attentive. I had really low blood pressure, actually. I actually fainted and fell in the hospital, which was not right. If you were to have this conversation with Graham, he would recount that story as being one of the worst and serious moments for him. For me, I barely remember it. I do, however, remember the massive bruise I had on my head for the six following weeks. In fact, I would even maintain that that fall in the hospital hurt more than the birth is an absurd thing to say. 

Miranda Markham  42:11  

Anyway, we stayed there and they were very kind to us. While we were there, we basically formulated a plan that initially we would go to a hotel. This doesn’t sound like a tremendously large undertaking, except that you have to remember that this was in the peak of Coronavirus, lockdown, and only key workers were allowed to stay in hotels, otherwise, they were completely shut down. So a very kind friend of ours called a local hotel and explained our situation, basically begging them to give us a room. Very thankfully, they agreed. 

Miranda Markham  42:49  

I think that was a good thing for us to do, at least initially, because it afforded us a bit more time to just be in a neutral space. Away from all the reminders and everything in our flat and work out what we were going to do next. Just the way to shut away from the world for a little bit. So we stayed in that hotel for I think three days. I barely left the room. It’s funny now, it’s hard to remember what we did all day. I mean, we never turn the TV on. We barely left. I don’t know how we filled the days. But somehow we did. 

Miranda Markham  43:31  

We got through it and eventually made the plan to go to Edinburgh. My parents own a flat there. It’s normally a rental property, especially in the summertime, but again, because of COVID it was vacant. Nobody had been there for many, many months. Actually my parents were thrilled to be able to offer it to us and be just that somebody would finally be going there and checking on their place. 

Miranda Markham  43:57  

It did mean that we had to go back to the slot. We had to pack up some stuff. So we did so in the most sort of formulaic and sort of mission critical kind of way. I made a list. It was very rigid. I went in with the sole purpose of putting stuff in a bag and then to leave immediately. That’s what we did. Then we stayed in Edinburgh for two months. 

Winter  44:19  

Wow, that’s– Yeah. Did you and– I’m assuming you guys just took some time off. You were on maternity leave. 

Miranda Markham  44:28  

Yeah.

Winter  44:29  

Graham was able to take some time off I’m assuming too?

Miranda Markham  44:31  

Yeah, so I was already on maternity leave. So obviously there was no work obligation to do anything. By that point, we had communicated with sort of the main people what had happened. My team was included in that. Graham took a month off work. I don’t think it was really ever like an agreement. I think it was his boss at the time who basically just said, do whatever you need to do. 

Miranda Markham  44:59  

His full time job essentially became taking care of me. I was– I could– I didn’t– I couldn’t have taken care of myself. I would not have gotten out of bed, there is a 0% chance I would have done anything. I wouldn’t have eaten. It took me months to get my appetite back and enjoy food again. Eating was such a challenge. I made a goal for myself in the early days to eat breakfast before noon. That was my only day objective was to get out of bed. I didn’t even have to put clothes on or shower, just go and put food in my mouth. Even that would take me hours, hours and hours. Those were really hard days. 

Winter  45:41  

Yeah. When you guys were in the hospital, did they approach you about what you guys wanted to do with George’s body?

Miranda Markham  45:50  

Yes, they did. They very kindly talked us through the different options. I remember we continued to ask well, what do people normally do? Because there’s no rulebook for this. I think when you’re so blindsided as we were, you have no guideline. 

Miranda Markham  46:15  

I think for lots of families, religion often becomes something to lean on when the unexpected happens. There are very specific customs and traditions around what happens when someone dies. I think for us we’re not tremendously religious, or spiritual people, or we weren’t prior to George’s death. We had nobody in our lives, other than you know grandparents had died. That wasn’t really our responsibility to arrange any funerals or anything right? We had no idea what to do. Our families couldn’t really help us because they’re so far away, and with no option to get to us. 

Miranda Markham  46:59  

So we were told many, many times, we didn’t have to decide right away at any point. Again George, because stay at the hospital, and he would be well taken care of, and that we could decide when we decided. 

Winter  47:16  

Oh, okay. 

Miranda Markham  47:17  

I remember waking up in an absolute panic on so many occasions, just needing to know where George was. Where is he ? Who is taking care of him? Is someone looking after him? Calling the hospital and asking our bereavement midwife, if she could just tell me where he was at. Every time she would very kindly go and check and tell me that he was in the, whatever they call it mortuary or morgue, and that a really nice man named Simon was looking after him. It did provide me with a bit of comfort, whether or not Simon was actually looking after him or not, I don’t know. I just thought his little body is just locked away in some cold, dark place, and we’ve just left him there. It defies every instinct in your body to do. 

Miranda Markham  48:14  

Your body still reacts as if you’ve had a baby, it still thinks you have one. Mine thought I’d abandoned ours. It was really, really difficult. So for that reason, the easiest thing to do was not make a decision about what to do, because that felt very final. We didn’t want to do anything impulsive, because we didn’t want to regret it. So we took our time, and ultimately decided that we would have him cremated for the probably most practical reason. Which is we’re not sure that we will stay in London forever. If we bury our son there, and we leave the country, it’s like abandoning him all over again. I couldn’t do that. 

Miranda Markham  49:02  

So we decided to have cremated. Once we decided that we were given a date, that we could do the funeral. I didn’t actually know this, but you legally must hold a funeral. For anyone that dies, including–

Winter  49:18  

Oh!

Miranda Markham  49:19  

–a baby. It was some sort of legal requirement. I mean, I think we would have liked to anyway, but I’m probably paraphrasing that too, simply. I remember it being that we had to conduct some kind of funeral for George, which was fine. 

Miranda Markham  49:34  

So I think the sad thing was that nobody could attend. It’s not like we would have had a big congregation of friends and acquaintances, but I think it would have been nice for our families to be there. Unfortunately, given the fact that they’d be flying from all over Canada and the US. None of them can come because this was now July of 2020. 

Miranda Markham  50:01  

So we were given the option to do a live streaming thing of the funeral, which we both just felt was really sort of weird and trivialized the whole thing. So instead, what we did was, we arranged the funeral we picked songs and readings that were meaningful. We both wrote quite lengthy comments to say to George. The only other attendee at the funeral was Sarah, our bereavement midwife.

Winter  50:32  

Oh really?

Miranda Markham  50:33  

She is the only other person on planet Earth who met George. So we felt like that was appropriate. She offered to come, which I don’t know is her usual offer. I like to think that we were special, but maybe she makes that offer to everyone. I don’t know. But it was nice to have her there. So we did our little funeral, we had a 30 minute slot. That was that.

Winter  51:03  

Just at the hospital then?

Miranda Markham  51:05  

So it’s arranged through the hospital with the City of London cemetery and crematorium. So we didn’t have to pay for it. Which I’m sorry I don’t know it sounds awful to be talking about the practicalities of such a thing. But I know lots of people are concerned about how do you pay for a funeral? It was just part of what was offered, which, I mean, maybe I need to go and reflect on that and be more grateful for it. I think if financially that became a concern, that would have been another layer of challenge on an already very challenging situation. It was all sort of coordinated and paid for through I’m not really sure through who. Through the NHS, the National Health Service, and in collaboration with the City of London.

Miranda Markham  51:52  

The cemetery that we went to was beautiful. It was a beautiful, sunny, gorgeous summer day. This I mean, if it sounds awful to say, but the funeral was really nice. It was I think the absolute best thing we could have done for a send off for George. 

Miranda Markham  52:12  

My aunt had sent me and members of the family this storybook called wherever you are my love will find you. It’s a children’s book, but I think that it seemed very appropriate. As the final thing on the agenda for the funeral, I read the story to George. Because I always thought about reading stories to him as a child or boy. So it was just a nice way to end it. 

Miranda Markham  52:41  

Then afterwards, because it’s I mean, obviously it’s a city run thing. So there’s funerals right before one and after another. It just was sort of a conveyor belt of funerals. Which just sounds awful again, but it wasn’t. There were loads of people outside after who were all gathering for other people who have died, mostly much older people.

Miranda Markham  53:03  

When people are cremated, they put these little stands with their name on it in this area where you can come and lay flowers, but nobody told us that. So we didn’t have any flowers. So George’s little stand was just there. It said baby George Robert and nothing. Somebody had put this dried old flower on it from I think somebody else’s area. I just felt so guilty that we hadn’t brought flowers. Then this really lovely family that was next to us, who were sending off their grandmother Jean came and gave us this huge bouquet of white flowers. They told us that we could leave them for George.

Miranda Markham  53:56  

I just thought it was so nice, because I just couldn’t leave without his little area being there. So they also told us about Jean and said they were releasing balloons for her and they would release one for George too. So they tied it together with one and said it was for both of them. There was such a nice gesture from complete strangers. So that really stayed with us and felt like a really important way to end that day. 

Miranda Markham  54:29  

I think we both felt sort of a sense of closure after that. Because I mean George was born on June the 2nd and his funeral was the 31st of July. So I mean, this is a long time after. It took us a long time to just figure out what we wanted to do and then get it sorted. I did feel guilty about that. But I’m happy that we took time to do it right because I don’t think we have any regrets about his send off. I think it was the best we could do. 

Winter  55:03  

Yeah. Did they find anything conclusive about what had happened? Did you guys do an autopsy? Was that something? I’m not? Like I said, I’m not totally sure about the UK health system. So was that something that was offered? Or is it pretty typical? Tell me a little bit about that?

Miranda Markham  55:22  

Yeah. So along with everything I think they were very persistent in a kind way about all of our different options. Including having a postmortem or sort of autopsy for George. We didn’t need a lot of convincing. I think both Graham and I were very convinced from the very beginning that if there was a way to get answers and information we wanted it. I don’t know if I ever said this out loud. But I was fairly sure in my head before we even left the hospital that we would try for another baby. I needed to know that if there was anything wrong, that caused George to die, we needed to know about it. 

Miranda Markham  56:07  

So many, many weeks later, this is now sometime in mid August, they finally got the results of the postmortem. It was actually the same day that we were allowed to go pick up George’s ashes at the crematorium, which seems like an odd thing to do on the same day. But I remember we drove back to the crematorium, picked up George, and then drove to the hospital to do his post mortem review. I remember Graham and I parking the car. And I said to him, what should we do with George? And he looked at me, he’s like, we can’t leave him in the car. That’s just bad parenting. I was like how can you make jokes? How? So that’s how George ended up in my handbag, at his own postmortem. Honestly, it’s so terrible. But it’s also amusing, in a way. 

Miranda Markham  57:07  

So I carried him in my case, it was in a little box. And he sat in my handbag, so we brought him back to the hospital where he was born. He sat in the room with us with the obstetrician and Sarah, the bereavement midwife. We went through his whole post mortem and in great detail, they were very generous with their time. Ultimately, they told us that his cause of death was growth restriction as a result of my placenta, which was very small. So under fifth percentile. 

Winter  57:40  

Oh!

Miranda Markham  57:40  

So basically, it just failed to support him. I think that it’s odd to say that we feel grateful for that result. But I think it’s because we now know that loss families never get an answer, and it’s inconclusive. So for us to now know that this is the thing that happened, there is no reason to assume that it would ever happen again. But if it did, there are things that we can do to prevent it. 

Miranda Markham  58:12  

So what they would do for a subsequent pregnancy is more regular growth scans starting from 20 weeks. What baffles me is that we can literally see a baby growing inside of someone, but we can’t measure the size of the placenta. Apparently you can’t. I don’t know why. But what they can do is make sure that the baby is growing properly, and the right sort of rate of growth. Also I can be induced early. So basically what we know is that if history were to repeat itself, we know that the placenta was good enough until 39 weeks. So basically, I would get to full term, so 37 weeks, and they would induce me early. 

Miranda Markham  58:54  

I think for us that was a real comfort, because it sounds like this is not likely to happen again. But even if it did, history will repeat itself. So we and then of course alongside that, I mean, we absolutely grilled them on everything we wanted to know in terms of what if this had happened, would this have made a difference? I was particularly adamant about the missed appointments and had the 36 weeks appointment had happened would this have indicated that there was a problem. The response that I continue to get was that it may or may not have made a difference. It’s impossible to know, that’s a really hard thing to live with. Because I think in my mind, it definitely would have made a difference. 

Miranda Markham  59:42  

Even having spoken to third party Obstetricians in the aftermath of George’s death, a lot of them have said that based on what they see and all of my information, everything was done exactly as it should have been. Regardless of what hospital I was at in London. It likely would have been the same outcome. That’s also hard to hear. But it’s also a bit of a reassurance. I think there was a time where I held a lot of anger towards the NHS and to the hospital for letting me down and that they had failed. I think just to set the record straight, there was no negligence. I’m not claiming that they did anything negligent or wrong. I think they had to make changes given an unprecedented situation. It’s impossible to know if those changes contributed to George’s death. Personally, I believe that they did, but we will never know.

Winter  1:00:36  

How big was George when he was born?

Miranda Markham  1:00:39  

He was small, he was 5.9 pounds, so just under six pounds. It is interesting because I had a private scan at 36 weeks. 

Winter  1:00:50  

Oh, okay. 

Miranda Markham  1:00:50  

No, sorry, maybe slightly earlier, 34 weeks, because I was worried. With everything happening. I just thought it’d be good to go get a bit of reassurance and make sure he’s growing okay. At that stage everything was fine. He looked really good. They projected his birth weight would be seven and a half pounds. 

Winter  1:01:07  

Oh.

Miranda Markham  1:01:09  

So, you can clearly see that’s quite a shortfall. Obviously, at some point between 34 weeks and 39 weeks, his growth just plateaued, basically. Because it wasn’t being checked regularly, no one would have noticed. And because at 38 weeks, as far as they were concerned, he still fit within the range of what was normal. I’ll be it perhaps a bit small. It was nothing. It would have not raised any alarm bells for anyone. So, that’s frustrating. Because I think in my mind, had they been measuring me more regularly, they would have seen that graph had suddenly leveled off instead of increasing upwards. But as it was, I was only measured twice the entire pregnancy. 

Winter  1:01:54  

Right. Yeah, that would be frustrating. Miranda, thank you so much for sharing George’s birth story. I had one last question that I want to ask you. How did you guys choose the name George?

Miranda Markham  1:02:06  

Right. I came up with it I think when we were on our trip in Mauritius. I’d love to have the story that it was this family name and it has all this meaning. But ultimately, we wanted a boy’s name that was easy to pronounce, easy to spell. Could also translate reasonably well to other languages. My sister in law, husband is Spanish, my husband loves speaking French. So George is a name that kind of can work in all those languages. We also like that George is the patron saint of England; he’d be born in England, which is nice. It just sort of felt right. 

Miranda Markham  1:02:49  

His middle name Robert does have family significance. Robert is the name of my husband’s grandfather, who was a much beloved patriarch of the family. He lived to be 97 years old, and was an excellent member of the family. ‘m so grateful that I got to spend some time with him before he passed and got to get to know him. So we wanted to honor him and his legacy with the firstborn grandson of the family.

Winter  1:03:23  

That is wonderful. Thank you so much. That was very good to get to know George A little bit better.

Miranda Markham  1:03:30  

I’m very happy to talk about him. So thank you for asking me all those questions and giving me an opportunity to talk about George.

Winter  1:03:38  

Of course.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Mom Angelica, a NICU nurse based in Idaho, USA, tells of how she and her husband Nick expecting her 2nd baby Ezra. Her pregnancy was going fine till around 33 weeks, when she noticed that he wasn’t moving around as much during a work break. She went home, worried and tried to calm her fears, but got even more worried when she couldn’t find his heartbeat using her own stethoscope. She and her husband wen to the hospital (during the COVID pandemic), and were told that there was no heartbeat.

Angelica delivered her son Ezra in June 2020 via C-section. Despite all the restrictions due to the pandemic, their parents and some family were able to meet Ezra after he was born. At the time of the recording, the cause of Ezra’s death was unknown.

Watch here (YouTube):

Listen here (podcast):

Time Stamps:

00:00 Ezra
01:22 Angelica’s intro
05:32 How was pregnancy
12:06 When they found out
31:27 C-section and meeting Ezra
36:57 Time with Ezra
48:07 Funeral arrangements
53:50 Did they find anything?

You might appreciate these other episodes:

• Watch/listen to Angelica’s advice episode of son Ezra: Click here
• Watch/listen to Tiffany‘s birth episode of daughter Khyana’s: Click here

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Full Transcription:

Angelica 0:00
Ezra Wilde

Angelica 0:08
He had dark blonde hair, and his second toe is longer than his big toe. Just like his papas. And when he was born he looked like his sister.

Winter 0:22
Welcome to Still A Part of Us a place where moms and dads share the story of their child who was stillborn or who died in infancy. I’m Winter.

Lee 0:29
And I’m Lee, we are grateful you joined us today. Please note that this is a story of loss and has triggers.

Winter 0:35
Thanks to our lost parents who are willing to be vulnerable and share their children with us.

Lee 0:39
If you’re listening to this podcast, just know that on our YouTube channel, there are pictures and videos that are related to the stories that are being shared.

Winter 0:46
Subscribe and share it with a friend that might need it and tell them to subscribe. Why? Because people need to know that even though our babies are no longer with us, they’re still a part of us.

Winter 1:02
We are so excited to have Angelica here today to talk about her sweet son, Ezra. Angelica, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about Ezra. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you? Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? Yeah, where? And guess where you were at the time of Ezra’s birth.

Angelica 1:22
Thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate you wanting to hear his story. My name is Angelica. I am 32 years old. I live in Idaho. I’m a registered nurse. I have worked for eight years, but the last four years have been in the neonatal ICU, which has been kind of an especially interesting challenge as of late.

Winter 1:49
Yes, I am sure.

Angelica 1:53
But I was working full time when I was pregnant with him. Kind of through COVID, too, but nothing really ever changed for me because I was still working in a hospital setting. So–

Winter 2:06
Yeah.

Angelica 2:07
Still going in a few days a week.

Winter 2:11
Great. And what does your family look like who you mentioned Ezra’s papa? So–

Angelica 2:20
I have been married for almost 10 years to my husband, Nick. We have a three and a half year old little girl named Philippa.

Winter 2:30
Awesome. That’s wonderful. And anything you guys like to do in your spare time, any hobbies as a family? Or personally?

Angelica 2:39
My husband and I met in college in the marching band.

Winter 2:43
You did?

Angelica 2:44
Yes.

Winter 2:45
So what Okay, I got to ask what did you play in the marching band? Because I was in the marching band too.

Winter 2:51
Oh, really?

Winter 2:52
Uh huh.

Angelica 2:52
Oh, I played alto saxophone.

Winter 2:55
Nice.

Angelica 2:56
Nick played the trombone.

Winter 2:59
Wonderful. That is, I have fond memories of the marching band. So I love that you guys met in the marching band.

Angelica 3:08
I mean, after college, we would play in wind ensembles together. But it kind of dwindled after Philippa was born. Now with COVID it’s not really all that safe to be playing the wind instruments.

Winter 3:22
Exactly.

Angelica 3:25
But that was what we used to do for fun. Then just spending time with our family. We have extended family fairly close. Nick’s parents live about two minutes away. Mine are about five minutes away.

Winter 3:37
Oh, that’s great.

Angelica 3:39
My brother and sister in law live about two minutes away as well.

Winter 3:42
Now, that’s a blessing I have found to have family nearby. So that’s wonderful. I know we’re going to touch on this a little bit later. But I just wanted to point out that you are a NICU nurse. That is quite heavy I’m sure. So I appreciate you coming on because this can probably lend a little bit more of a different perspective for our listeners. So thank you so much for coming on again.

Angelica 4:13
Thank you so much.

Winter 4:15
So yeah, and when was Ezra born? Can you give us kind of some context, you don’t have to give his exact birth date, but can you give us like, how long ago was it that he was born?

Angelica 4:27
He was born on June 1st of 2020.

Winter 4:30
Okay.

Angelica 4:31
It has been a little over 10 months?

Winter 4:33
Yeah, it’s still very new for you. I’m so sorry that it is so raw still I’m sure for you. So tell me, were you planning on getting pregnant with Ezra, any fertility issues, or was that something that was part of your general family plan?

Angelica 4:54
We were really fortunate to not have any fertility issues. But it did take us about seven months before we found out that he was on the way. It took a while and sometimes it can feel like forever. When you’re trying.

Winter 5:09
Yeah.

Angelica 5:10
When you’re talking when you’re trying to build your family, and you have this timeline in the back of your head, and you just realize exactly how little control you have over it.

Winter 5:20
Yeah, it’s so frustrating. But that’s great that you guys found out you’re pregnant. So he was planned and how was your pregnancy?

Angelica 5:32
It was actually, it was really good. Until, it wasn’t.

Angelica 5:36
Yeah.

Angelica 5:37
We found out we were expecting him in November of 2019. I just remember being really excited, but also really nervous, kind of anticipating something bad to happen before anything ever did happen. You know, I’ve just always been a very anxious person, and especially working in the NICU. I know, I’ve seen a lot of things that can go wrong. So I guess, in my head I’m trying to anticipate those things all the time. Which is not especially good for my mental health, but I was kind of cautiously optimistic.

Winter 6:18
Okay.

Angelica 6:18
When we found out that we were expecting.

Winter 6:21
Now as I’m actually a little curious, how did Philippas’ pregnancy go? Were you still cautious? Because of that?

Angelica 6:28
Yeah, probably for different reasoning. Well, somewhat. So I had just started working in the NICU when we found out about Philipa.

Winter 6:39
Okay.

Angelica 6:41
Before that I was working in the adult world. So they put me into all of these kinds of orientation types of courses with the new grads, because working with the neonatal population is very different. So I was learning about all of the things that could happen as they were happening. As I was meeting each of these milestones in my own pregnancy with my daughter. I was so worried, just so anxious that something could happen. Kind of bracing myself for something to happen and nothing did. I just was building up all of this anxiety. And oh, gosh, I don’t know. It’s just the way that my brain works I guess. If there were an Olympic event for worrying, I would have so many gold medals. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Winter 7:43
Yeah, I usually am very, I guess, cautiously optimistic as well. Because you know, you just have a few things. You’ve seen enough things you’re like, something’s going to go bad. Yeah. So your pregnancy was good. Did you guys find out that he was going to be a boy at the 20 week scan? Is that something you guys wanted to do and make sure that you knew?

Angelica 8:10
Yeah, mostly because when it comes to naming our children, we wanted to cut the name cooldown by half if we could.

Winter 8:21
Smart.

Angelica 8:22
So, it was actually about 17 weeks that we found out that we were having a boy. We were actually able to bring Philippa with us to that appointment, not because we planned it that way. But we just couldn’t find anybody to take care of her that particular day. So it was the three of us there. They didn’t plan to do an ultrasound, but did one so that Philippa could see him and hear his heartbeat. And the doctor said, “Well, you know, we’re still a few weeks early, but would you like to know if it’s a boy or girl?” And he said, “Tentatively, I can tell you you’re having a boy.” And then three weeks later, it was confirmed.

Winter 9:03
That’s great. Oh, that’s special that Philippa was able to be there too. That’s so fun. That was probably before. I mean, that was probably in the middle of COVID, too, wasn’t it? When you had that appointment?

Angelica 9:16
It was before lockdown.

Winter 9:18
Okay.

Angelica 9:19
Before lockdown at that point they were still allowing family to come with you–

Winter 9:26
Okay.

Angelica 9:26
–To your appointments. They hadn’t told us anything about not allowing children and we just figured that we would keep her the distance in case she happened to be one of those asymptomatic carriers, or something like that. Keep her away from the other parents.

Winter 9:40
Yeah.

Angelica 9:41
Then bring her into the office and keep her on the opposite side of the room from the doctor, but just you’re considering what happened. I’m just so grateful that she was there. I know that she probably won’t remember it. But–

Winter 9:54
Yeah, what a blessing really that is so special. For her to have been there. How are your other appointments? Were there? Was there anything at all that was of concern? I guess?

Angelica 10:06
Not really, actually. That was one of the things that made me feel so perplexed about this, just this feeling of impending doom that I constantly had through the pregnancy. About the only thing that was a little bit abnormal, was during the 20 week ultrasound when we were taking a look at his heart. There were three areas of echogenicity. I think it was his left atrium. Philipaa had one in her left atrium as well. I talked with the doctor about a little bit, but he said, “Unless there were more, more spots or more areas of echogenicity, that you can see that, he wouldn’t recommend a fetal echo.”

Winter 10:53
Okay.

Angelica 10:54
Just that they were small areas of calcification, and that he wasn’t concerned about it. So I tried to not be concerned about it, too. But he was healthy and strong and so active. I remember Philippa, she moved around a lot, but he was a little ninja in there.

Winter 11:21
Oh, that’s so great. So super active?

Angelica 11:26
Yes, extremely active and his movement was extremely predictable too. Which was something that I was really grateful for. Because that gave me a little bit of solace, when I would start to worry about something, you know. I think to myself, “Oh, I haven’t felt him move for a little bit.” Then he would give me a little jab and I know, he was okay.

Winter 11:47
Like, I’m hearing you mom. So that is going along just fine. Tell me what happened. What were those series of events that led to you finding out that Ezra was going to be still born.

Angelica 12:05
So it was a string of three days that I was working, starting from May, oh goodness, I think it was May 29. It had been really busy on the unit, just a lot of acuity. High census. Just a lot of work for all of us to do. I got to day number three.

Angelica 12:35
So at that point it was May 31st. I had a really busy assignment, and was finally able to slow down and get some lunch. It was about three o’clock at that point, three, or three thirty. I remember feeling him move around the time when I was eating lunch. But then I went back to my assignment. With everything that I was doing, I guess I just wasn’t paying attention to see if he was moving anymore, or at any point after that.

Angelica 13:05
So I finished up my shift and gave a report. I still had so much charting to do. So I sat down and was drinking cold water, expecting him to move, but he wasn’t moving. That set off alarm bells in my head. But I know that I’m an anxious person already. So I thought that I was just overreacting a little bit, that something just didn’t feel quite right.

Angelica 13:38
I finished charting and left the unit. I was walking to my car, and just checking my phone for any messages that I had missed. My mom had sent me a photograph of my grandmother. I realized that it had been 12 years since her passing. So she passed on the 31st. I don’t know why I felt like that was strangely significant. I just felt so sad.

Angelica 14:11
But you know, I was still talking to Ezra, still kind of rubbing my belly and walking to my car. Telling him that we were going to go home and see what his sister and Papa were doing. I got home and I remember just thinking to myself, like he hadn’t moved while I was in the car. I told my husband and at that point Philippa was already in bed asleep. So I actually think I’d given her a kiss on the forehead that morning when I went to work, but I hadn’t seen her beyond that. I was so preoccupied with the fact he wasn’t moving that I didn’t go in to kiss her goodnight.

Angelica 14:55
So, we had dinner and I tried to kind of elicit a little bit of movement. I think I ate an orange, trying to get him to move. Even brought out ice packs and kind of held them on either side of my abdomen to see if I could get him to do anything. My husband said, “Oh there, I thought I felt something.” And so I took a little bit of a deep breath. I thought, okay, well, maybe I’m just overreacting at this point.

Angelica 15:27
I took a shower, but I still wasn’t feeling that really significant movement I was accustomed to, and then we started to get ready for bed. It was a Sunday. My last day of work, I wasn’t going into work the following morning, but Nick was. So he started to get settled for work, or settle the bed prior to the new work week.

Angelica 15:53
I see that for a little bit and started a kick count. I actually pulled out my stethoscope and tried to find him. I could usually find him if I couldn’t hear him terribly well, at the very least I could hear his heartbeat. Even if it sounded distant there, you know, but I couldn’t find him. I started to panic a little bit. So about 23 minutes into the kick count, I stopped. I knew that I was supposed to go for about two hours or so, but I just haven’t felt anything for at least that one. So I called L&D and asked them what they thought, because I wanted to get their opinion. And make sure I wasn’t going in unnecessarily. They told me to go.

Angelica 16:50
It was also very late at that point. It was after midnight. So at that point, Nick had fallen asleep. So I went and I got dressed. I even remember looking up and down at things in my closet thinking to myself, okay, so if something is wrong, there’s something really awful has happened. What clothing do I not mind hating for the rest of my life?

Angelica 17:18
I woke my husband up and I told him that I was gonna go to the hospital. He asked me if I wanted him to have him go with me. I told him not to because if I was overreacting, I didn’t want to wake up our family and make them worry for nothing. Especially since everybody else had to work too. So I told him to stay with Philipa.

Angelica 17:47
I left and I remember leaving with a phone charger that I could have in my hospital room, my ID, my insurance card, my clothes and that was it. I didn’t even have a hospital bag packed and honestly, the unpacked hospital bag is still hanging where it was 10 months ago. I haven’t been able to touch it.

Winter 18:16
Angelica, can I ask you a quick question?

Angelica 18:19
Yeah.

Winter 18:19
What week are you at this time?

Angelica 18:23
Oh, sorry about that. At this point I am 33 weeks and five days.

Winter 18:28
Okay.

Angelica 18:28
Gestation.

Winter 18:29
Okay.

Angelica 18:30
I remember that really distinctly because I remember having read so many stories, just with COVID-19 being so unpredictable. I had read a story about a mother who had lost her life at about 33 weeks or so. And because we were about at the same place in our pregnancies, I thought to myself, okay, if I can just to get through this week, I’ll be okay. If I can get to 34 everything will be okay.

Angelica 19:06
I was seriously doubting that things are gonna be okay, at that point. So I was driving, and I went to the same hospital that I work at. Triage for labor and delivery is right down the hall from the NICU. So I had been there earlier in the day. I could have gone at any point in the day. And that’s been a really hard thing, actually, knowing that I was there all day long. I could have gone over and that maybe things would have been different.

Angelica 19:39
So I’m driving and I’m talking to him. I’m driving in silence. Just thinking to myself, what might be happening. Considering what could cause decreased fetal movement in him at that point. Trying to determine what was going on, if anything. How he was going to do if he was going to be delivered that night, or I guess at that point that morning, because it was really early on June 1st. I kept telling him, it’s okay, we’re gonna be okay, you’re gonna be okay.

Angelica 20:18
I arrived to the hospital and I parked the car. I had forgotten the mask. So I entered through the emergency room, which is where they were having everyone enter, and they handed me a mask. The nurse who was at the front desk asked me if I knew where L&D was, and I told them that I did. Then, you know, seeing me with my giant protruding belly, he looked at me, he said, good luck and sent me upstairs.

Angelica 20:50
I just remember feeling so much dread, at that point, so much dread walking those halls and waiting for the elevator to come up, or to come back down. The elevator to come down to get checked in to triage. They got me into my room and started to set up the doppler, but my nurse couldn’t find him and couldn’t find Ezra anywhere. She asked me where we normally were able to find him. So I pointed on my abdomen to where she could go and still nothing. She told me, she said, “You know what, I’m going to call the doctor and see if the doctor can bring down a machine. An ultrasound machine so that we can see what’s going on.”

Angelica 21:44
There’s a part of me that knew what was going on when she said that, but I didn’t want to believe that anything was severely wrong. So I just kind of took a breath and talked to him until the doctor came. I ended up falling asleep a little bit. Because I hadn’t slept at all since about 6:45am the morning before. So I was nodding off. I thought to myself, there’s no way that I could be falling asleep if something is seriously wrong.

Angelica 22:26
I was awoken by the doctor on call coming through. He said, “I am so sorry that it took me so long.” He said, “I got here as soon as I could and they even said some prayers on the way down.” There was a part of me that thought that is so sweet, but then there’s another part of me that thought, oh, gosh, you know, if you’re praying that things are okay, then my guess is that things really aren’t. So he even told me to take my mask off at that point. I told him “No, it’s okay. You know, I feel fine. I’m comfortable. It’s okay.”

Angelica 23:02
So he started the ultrasound. Taking a look at Ezra and the screens at a little bit of an angle and there was no movement. As he was passing up along his rib cage, I was trying to see if I could find his heartbeat, but I couldn’t see anything. I wasn’t hearing anything either. I thought to myself, this is not okay, something is really, really not okay. But then I thought to myself, you were not trained to do an ultrasound. So just take a minute. Maybe everything’s fine. He traced back and forth along my abdomen for a long time. At least it felt like a long time.

Angelica 23:52
Then he looked up at me, and his eyes had started to get a little bit glassy and said, I just need to be absolutely sure. In the back of my brain I’m screaming, absolutely sure of what? Absolutely sure of what? Then he put the wand down and he looked at me and he said, “I am so so sorry.”

Angelica 24:20
At that point, nobody, not one of us had said the words gone, dead or no heartbeat. He didn’t need to say anything more for me to know what happened, or to understand what he saw or didn’t see. I started to fall apart. The nurse asked me if there was anyone that I needed for them to call. I said yes please to my husband.

Angelica 24:55
At that point I felt my phone buzz and I guess Nick had woken up and realized how long I’d been gone. Asked me if everything was okay. So I told him and I was just in tears struggling to get words out. I didn’t even tell him what had happened. All I asked him was if he could come to the hospital. I don’t know if it was because I genuinely was just forgetful. Like I had forgot to mention something. Or didn’t want to say it out loud, because that would make it real. And he said, “Yes, yes. You know, I’ll be there. I’ll be there soon.”

Angelica 25:43
He started to call around and try to find someone to be there with Philippa. To stay with her overnight. So I hung up the phone, and my doctor was really kind. He sat with me for a little bit, but then he had to go. It took Nick about 20 minutes to get to the hospital. We live about 15 minutes away. But he struggled to find anybody awake at that point. It was two am I think, two, two 15. But he ended up getting ahold of his dad. His dad came to stay with our daughter.

Angelica 26:36
That time period, it felt like forever. But for that time period, I just remember rocking back and forth and crying. Holding, clutching my abdomen and then saying I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Over and over again, I didn’t know what to say, or what else to do. When Nick arrived I gave him a big hug.

Angelica 27:06
It wasn’t too much longer after that, that the doctor came back in with the ultrasound machine. He said, “Guys, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to torture you here. But this is the doctor in me wanting to be 100% sure of what I saw. Because if I’m wrong, then there’s no way that I can forgive myself.” So he did another ultrasound. At that point, Nick knew. Nick knew it. Later when I talked to him, he said “That I almost didn’t need to mention what had happened. To say out loud what had happened. Because he knew something was very wrong. Like beyond, we’re going to deliver him tonight and he’s very sick, wrong.”

Angelica 27:59
So after that second ultrasound, the doctor dealt with one, he said, I’m so sorry again. Then he told us that he and his wife had experienced a loss like that about a decade before. He said not to blame ourselves for anything. And not to turn pain and the anger inward. You know, he said that he would come back in a little bit for us to determine what the next steps were going to be.

Angelica 28:36
At that point Nick he held my hand. He said what are we gonna call him? ”Philippa, what are we going to call him? And we had actually narrowed our names down to Felix and Ezra. For some reason, blessed you know, the days leading up to that I had been calling him Ezra just kind of trying, you know, it felt great. That was what we named him. Ezra Wilde like Oscar Wilde because Philippa, his middle name, is danger.

Winter 29:26
I love that so much.

Angelica 29:30
It was Nick’s idea. So we figured we needed to follow the theme. Then Nick looked at me, he said, “Well, at least the hardest part is over.” And I looked at him and I said, “No, the hardest part is not over.” You know, for as awful as it is to be told that your child is dead. Now we have to deliver him.

Angelica 30:04
The doctor came in and talked a little bit about it. We have a scheduled c-section that we had actually made at eight weeks, which I thought was way too early for them to be putting me on the OR schedule. Just nursing superstition, I guess, very much akin to that feeling that you get when somebody says the word quiet on the floor?

Winter 30:30
Yes.

Angelica 30:31
You know that he was scheduled c-section repeat c-section because I’d had a C-section with my daughter and been diagnosed with a supple pelvic disproportion. I just was not built to have a vaginal delivery. So instead of attempting a V back, I said, “No, just go ahead and put us on the schedule whenever.” I was fine with not waiting until my doctor, my attending actually came on to came on duty. The anesthetist came and chatted with us too. He was surprisingly cheery, which I thought would be bothersome, but it really wasn’t. It was almost kind of helpful.

Angelica 31:27
Then I fell asleep. And I woke up a few hours later, when they came in for surgery. They put me on the schedule for about 630 or so. Yeah, I remember waking up and then all of a sudden I felt cramps. You know, just kind of the beginning of contractions, I thought anyway. I started to feel really sick to my stomach, just really, really nauseated. They had, they’d already talked to me. So they wheeled me out and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll get something in your system.” They started an IV, they did a lot of blood, a lot of blood for testing on me to determine what had happened.

Angelica 32:29
They wheeled me into the OR, and put me onto the table and told me that we’re going to do a spinal block. So they kind of sat me up and Nick was getting ready into hospital scrubs. So they told me to sit up and I did. When I did, I looked off into the corner where my heart chart was sitting and there was a giant butterfly pasted on the front of it. Then I fell apart I just fell apart. Because that made it that much more real.

Angelica 33:08
Then at the same time, I was thinking about the fact that before my husband even knew the true nature of what had happened my co-workers probably knew because they probably saw 33 weeker coming to triage. We’re anticipating potentially getting said 33 weeker. Then the status went from you know, absent fetal movement to fetal demise, and just all of it just was too much. It’s just way too much.

Angelica 33:39
They pulled up the drape and started the surgery. Shortly before that my husband had come in and he was sitting at my side. I mean, neither of us really were in a great headspace. We just didn’t know we were both in such a shock. For Philippa’s birth Nick brought in his phone, and he was taking pictures as they were doing surgery. This time around, he forgot his phone. So the only photo that we have in the OR is the one that the anesthetist took for us with his phone. I’m just laying there and just crying. The OR is silent, just painfully silent.

Angelica 34:34
Later someone asked me “Oh, which NICU team came to attend your C-section?” Because that’s just standard protocol in the NICU. You attend every c-section. I had to look at them and say nobody was there. Nobody attended my C section because why would a NICU team be there for a babys who dead?

Angelica 34:54
I felt a lot of pressure and then I felt no pressure at all, just emptiness. That was when I knew that he had been born because I could just tell he was gone. I just thought, you know, hr is not physically there anymore. No one had told me that he had been born, but I could hear a nurse begin to cry. And she said, “Oh, he’s so beautiful.”

Angelica 35:26
She brought him over to a little warmer, and laid him down on a swaddle blanket. The swaddle had trucks overtop of it. And she began to swaddle him up. My husband went over a little warmer and took a look at him and said, “He looks just like Phillippa, he looks just like her.” Just if I had started to get any degree through the calm. It was shattered at that point, and I just started to sob again. Then the nurse handed him to my husband, and he brought him over put his cheek against mine. If I didn’t know any better for as warm as his cheek was I would have thought that he was still alive. He was born at 6:42am on June 1st.

Angelica 36:27
Not too long after that my attending physician came in. He said, “I’m so, so sorry.” You know, he just kind of ducked into the OR. He said, “I’m so, so sorry. We’ll figure out what happened. We’re gonna figure out what happened.” And he gave my shoulder a squeeze and he left. They took Nick into the recovery room before they had finished closing on me.

Angelica 37:00
It wasn’t very long before they dropped the drape. I could tell that the obstetrician who was working on me he was the same doctor who told us that Ezra was gone. I could see that he’d been crying the entire time. His eyes were beat red. And I asked him “What happened?” He said, “I’m not sure.” He said, “The assessment looks perfect. It’s perfect. There’s nothing wrong with the umbilical cord. Nothing that I could see. I’m not even sure that y’all want to have the placenta tested, because I just don’t see anything. Well, I don’t see anything wrong. I’m not sure what happened.”

Angelica 37:48
So once they were done, they wheeled me out. They took me into labor and delivery. I thought that maybe they were going to take me on to a different floor, or something away from other laboring moms and living babies. But I was wheeled into room 10 I can remember. I remember going in there thinking to myself, the last time I was in the room, we were here for a code for another baby. Just, you know, the awful things that you remember, having worked in the same hospital.

Angelica 38:24
When I got in there, Nick was cradling Ezra. They got my bed situated. They helped me to sit up a little bit. Nick looked at me and said, “I heard another baby being born a few minutes ago.” While they were kind of showing him into the room. I started to cry again. And he said, “No, no, it’s okay. I’m just so grateful that their baby is okay.”

Angelica 38:56
We got to rock him, talk to him, and sing to him. We weren’t sure because of the pandemic if our family was going to be able to come and see him. But we talked with our nurse and she talked to her charge. The charge talked to the house supervisor and they’re like, “No, we’re going to get people in here for you. Just give us a list of names.”

Angelica 39:19
So they allowed my parents, Nick’s parents, my brother and sister in law to come up. Nick has a sister and a half brother, but both of them live Upstate. Then he looked at me and said, “Well, wait a minute, what about Philipa?” And I said ,”No.” I would have loved her to be there. For her to have been there. I would love that. But at the same time, I didn’t imagine that they would be too keen on the idea of having a two year old in my hospital room.

Angelica 39:59
So slowly, our family members started to trickle in all of them just as just as red eyed and perplexed, as we were. Our nurse got a bunch of footprints, she got sets of footprints for all four couples. So my husband and I, his parents, my parents, my brother and sister in law.

Angelica 40:32
They told us that we could have two visitors at a time. So they came in couples. It started with my parents. They went to leave and my nurse came and she said, “Oh, you know, wait a second, you know, weren’t your parents going to stay for longer?” And I said, “No, we’re only supposed to have two sets of parents, to two visitors at any one given point in time.” She’s like, “No, forget about that. You can have all of them in here if you want, we don’t care.”

Angelica 41:07
So we called them back. Then all the grandparents were there with him at the same time. Eventually, when everybody had a chance to say hello, and goodbye. They all left. There was just the three of us. I asked Nick if he wanted to call one of our family members and show Phillipaa her baby brother. He said that he wasn’t sure that he could handle that. He wasn’t sure that she would really understand what was going on anyway.

Angelica 41:50
I kind of regret it at this point. Not at least asking if we could have had her come up. Even for a couple minutes. Not being more insistent on having somebody call us and show her Ezra through the phone.

Angelica 42:11
I remember holding him. At that point he was swaddled, but he was swaddled with his arms straight down. I wanted to see his hands. So I unswaddled him a little bit and brought his arms up. I remember saying out loud, he should have been swaddled with his hands close to face, because that’s what was developmentally appropriate. Then I realized how ridiculous that sounded. I just held them.

Angelica 42:47
I remember holding his hands and staring into space. We kind of looked at his hair. Nick said his hair was so dark. And I said, “No, it’s not. He just hasn’t been washed yet.” And so he kind of dusted up and held his hair a little bit. And I said, “No, look at his hair. It’s blonde, it’s dark blonde.” For anyone who maybe isn’t looking at a picture of me at this point, I am not blonde haired or blue eyed. I have relatively dark skin, hair, and eyes. So, you know, the fact that either of my children had blonde hair is it, I have no idea where they came from.

Angelica 43:35
I just looked him up and down which was just so amazing. Someone loved him. He weighed 4 pounds, 15 ounces, which is a pretty decent size for a 33 weeker. I was worried that maybe he wasn’t getting enough or something. No, he was getting enough.

Angelica 43:54
We were able to hold him for almost nine hours. They would have let us keep him for longer I think. At that point we noticed that his skin started to shear a little bit in different places. It was just getting progressively worse as time passed. So at that point, I mean, I didn’t even think to ask someone to bring clothing for him. I didn’t have a going home outfit for him, or anything like that I had nothing prepared for him. So he wasn’t clothed, and we didn’t bathe him because I had just been through surgery and I couldn’t breath very well.

Angelica 44:39
I was just so worried about damaging his skin that much more. So I didn’t want them to bathe him because even though I knew it wouldn’t hurt him. It would break my heart to continue to injure his skin. We sang to him, we gave him a bunch of kisses and I handed him over to Nick. I said, “Here you hold him last.” He said, “No, no. You should be able to hold him until he goes. I said, “I had 33 weeks with him. I got to feel him move. I think that you deserve to hold as long as we have him.” When the time came, we handed him over to our nurse and that was that.

Angelica 45:46
They gave me a weighted bear afterwards, which I proceeded to sleep with for about six months straight. We ended up staying in the hospital another two nights and going home on Wednesday morning. I remember my doctor, my own personal obstetrician coming in and he said, “Hey, you look like you’re feeling okay? Do you want to go home today?” I just thought to myself no. There is no way I can go home just yet. Not yet not to silence. I ended up staying for two nights and going home on Wednesday morning. They ended up putting me in a different department, so that I didn’t have to be up on newborn where you could hear babies cry. And that’s Ezra’s birth story.

Winter 47:06
Thanks for sharing that. I’m so glad that you got some time with him. That your hospital was willing to get your parents in there and your brother and sister-in-law. That just made me happy to hear that. I’ve heard so many stories that people have not had that chance and it’s so sad.

Angelica 47:35
It’s absolutely heart wrenching. This pandemic has made that process so much harder than it already is to begin with.

Winter 47:49
Yeah. You guys gave them Ezra and you stayed in the hospital for a couple more days. Did you guys end up deciding to have a funeral, or was he cremated? What did you guys decide to do with him?

Angelica 48:07
I actually grew up alongside an undeveloped portion of land built into a cemetery. It’s the house that my parents still live in. So we decided to have him buried there. I’ve had a couple of coworkers, three of them who have lost babies.

Winter 48:31
Oh really?

Angelica 48:33
Yes and their babies are buried in the same cemetery. Most recently, a friend of mine, she lost her little girl. She was about a month old or so. She had been in the NICU. She was very tiny, very premature. But she passed away. I remembered where she had buried her little girl. So that was actually when I was still in the hospital that my husband and my father-in-law, because my father-in-law and my mother-in-law, offered to pay for everything. For everything that the funeral home didn’t cover. For everything that the cemetery didn’t cover. They offered to pay for everything. Then they went over and we’re looking for a plot. So I told my husband to look for my friend’s little girl. It turns out that the plot right next to her was vacant, so they’re buried side by side.

Winter 49:43
That’s so nice.

Angelica 49:45
We didn’t get to have a funeral per say. We were raised Catholic, but at that point, you know, having a mass for him was completely out of the question which I completely understood. That was okay. So we had a graveside committal. The priest came in, he did a blessing over Ezra’s grave.

Angelica 50:11
We only had a small group of people there, including my friend. Because her little girls are right next to my son. We had a very small group of people and all of us were spread out because of the pandemic. Trying to keep this the cemetery’s staff safe in the process.

Angelica 50:40
Then, after that, I feel bad because I feel like there are so many things that I could have done, but did not. Because in the moment, I just wasn’t thinking about it. I was just shocked that this was happening. You know, I always knew that it could happen. I always knew that there was a possibility that something like this could happen. But regardless of how much I thought and I understood about child loss prior to this, as a nurse, I knew nothing. I knew nothing. What I understood, barely scratches the surface.

Angelica 51:22
So you know, in that moment, we didn’t play any music or anything like that. One of my other friends is super sweet. She brought a couple of pinwheels for him. We knew that eventually the pinwheels would be taken away because the cemetery cleans everything up periodically. So we buried one of them actually in there with him.

Winter 51:45
Oh you did?

Angelica 51:46
He was a pinwheel on top of his casket. Then my husband he quoted I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Muppet Christmas Carol.

Winter 52:01
Yes, we love that movie.

Angelica 52:05
It’s the scene after they find out that Tiny Tim has died. He said in this life, there are meetings and partings. That is the way that we will never forget Ezra and the love that he brought into our lives. It was something along the lines of that I very distinctly remember the reference to Muppet Christmas Carol.

Angelica 52:37
Then that was it. There was a small gathering that my mother and father in law had at their house. My brother and sister in law came from Washington. They cooked everything you know, made sure that we didn’t have to do anything. He just had a small gathering with everybody who was able to go to the service. Yeah. And it was wonderful. In a very melancholy kind of way.

Winter 53:14
Yeah. I’m so glad that you were able to be with family and friends it sounds like.

Angelica 53:25
We were very fortunate.

Winter 53:28
Angelica did you? I know that your ob said that he was going to try and find out as much as possible of what happened. Did you guys end up having an autopsy done? Sounds like you got blood also taken? Were they able to find anything, or is there anything conclusive about what happened to Ezra?

Angelica 53:50
No, unfortunately. We ended up drawing blood on me to determine if there was some kind of a clotting issue. Everything came back normal for me. They also wanted to do a cytogenetic microarray to determine if there was anything you know, anything genetically that would have caused his stillbirth. That was all completely normal as well.

Angelica 54:27
Originally, we thought that they were going to have to do the cytogenetic microarray on his own tissue. So you know, kind of maybe a tendon or something in the back of his ankle. But they were able to do it on the placenta. That came back normal with the offer to do an autopsy.

Angelica 54:50
I wanted to know what happened. So I was leaning toward yes, but my husband Nick didn’t even pause. He just said, “No. No, we’re not doing that.” You know, and the same thing with cremation. He said, “No, no, I just can’t, I can’t envision us doing that to him.” He said, “I know that he’s gone. And I know that he doesn’t hurt me more, but I can’t do that to him.” So at this point, we don’t know why. I don’t think we ever really will.

Angelica 55:28
I later asked the OB who delivered him. If under the same circumstances, he would have had an autopsy done. And he said, “As the doctor who has done autopsies on infants I don’t think I would have. I don’t think that there would have been anything of note to find, just based on his physical assessment.” He said, “He was perfect. There was nothing to indicate that there was an infectious process and the blood work showed that as well.” He said, “I just don’t know that we will have any answers. I don’t think we’ll have any answers. But under the same circumstances, no. I would not have done an autopsy on my child.” So it’s still just kind of up in the air.

Winter 56:22
It is kind of nice to hear and hear somebody say he looked perfect. And like he said, all intents and purposes he’s perfect. Angelica, thank you so much for sharing your story. It never ceases to surprise me how much I cry on this podcast even though I’m very familiar with some of these stories already. I appreciate you coming on and sharing Ezra with us.

Angelica 56:48
Thank you for allowing me to share him.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai