Closure?

Dear Stevie,
My doctor (who is wonderful, by the way) called me on Friday with the results of all the testing they've been doing to try and figure out why you died. When we discovered you had no heartbeat, my doctor was as shocked as I was. There had been no signs or red flags; up until that horrible day, everything had been perfect. Up until that horrible day, I had your normal, "textbook" pregnancy.

I had been preparing myself for the worst possible news--that you died from some genetic condition that could be/would be passed onto our next baby, if/when we ever get pregnant again. Or that you died from something I did (like taking too much asthma medication or something). Or that we'd fall into the 50% of people who never get any sort of answer to why their baby died.

Here's what they found. First of all, you were perfect. Perfect heart, perfect lungs, perfect brain, perfect little everything. You were even the perfect size for your gestational age, which leads the doctors to believe you hadn't been gone for long when we realized you had no heartbeat. The doctor also told me you were, in fact, female, to which I said, "Um, I had no idea there was any question that she was a girl!" I mean I guess I didn't think to check, but can you imagine if I found out now that you were actually a boy this whole time?? That would mess with my whole world view just a little! Geez!

But anyway, the placenta was also perfect. All the blood work and testing they did on me was perfect.

The only thing that wasn't perfect was your umbilical cord. They found what appears to be a blood clot in the cord, which essentially cut off all oxygen and nutrition for you and caused you to die. Damn umbilical cord ended my perfect pregnancy and killed my perfect little girl.

The strange thing is that they tested me for all the common blood-clotting disorders that usually cause something like this to happen, and I don't have any of them. I guess the next step is to test for some of the more rare and uncommon blood disorders and see if any of them are the culprit. Honestly, I kind of don't think I have a blood disorder because I have never had any issues with this before, but we'll see I guess. Either way, whether I have some weird disorder or if this "just happened" (there's that lovely phrase again!), I will be giving myself twice-daily injections of a blood thinner for the duration of my next pregnancy. Sucks, but I guess at least I'll know I'm being proactive and doing something to make sure this doesn't happen again, right? I guess that beats having to go through 9 months of "hoping" whatever happened the first time doesn't happen again.

Knowing why you died, at least in the medical sense, has helped bring a little bit of closure for me. Having a reason does make this a tiny bit easier to deal with. But even though I now know that is was a freak blood clot in the umbilical cord that made you die, I still don't know why it had to be your umbilical cord, my baby that died.

I guess I'll never know. I don't think I'll ever understand.

To know you were a perfectly healthy baby is both oddly reassuring and incredibly painful. I miss you so much, baby girl.

Love you,
Mom