Met with Drayke's last doctor & one of his daytime primary nurses. We met in the room we used to go to regularly for Parent Reach Out meetings every Wednesday. Just being back in the hospital was hard enough. Being on the 4th floor, which is the NICU was even harder.
There were surprises in the autopsy results. We thought the problem was type a flu. His nasal swab was positive. They ran the test on his lungs & heart and they were negative. The flu didnt kill him. It was a massive bowel infection that he could not fight. He was loaded with antibiotics but he just did not have enough reserves to be able to fight anything. All of his energy had gone into healing from the surgery we had wanted so badly: the trach/gtube/circumsision surgery the week before. A few days before that surgery he wasnt feeling great. I remember telling him "cmon baby boy, we have your surgery scheduled finally. You cant get sick now". We went thru with the surgery, now I am kicking myself for not paying more attention to the signs that he was getting sick before his surgery. I feel like I was being selfish in my desires to finally have a tape free baby. We should have waited another two weeks.
The biggest problem was that the bowel infection effected the perfusion of blood in his bowels and then his brain & the rest of his body systems.
We did have it confirmed that his hair was red blond and he had grey blue eyes (we never had bright light in his room). Other than having pulmonary hypertrophy & pulmonary hypertension he was otherwise perfect. All of his other organs we all very normal.
At this point it is all speculation as how things could have been different. What if my boss had not have fired me, leading to my severe blood pressure problems thus stunting Draykes growth in my womb during that last month.
3 comments:
“What ifs” are not very helpful. What if he got an infection sooner? What if you gave birth at 21 weeks? You always did what was best for him. You know it, I know it and he knows it. Be sad, be angry, but don’t ever blame yourself and don’t think there was anything you could have done to change what has happened. Getting through what you are going through is hard enough without manufacturing “What ifs”.
I wish you the best and thank you for sharing all you have shared. I hope you can keep posting as I will keep checking back from time to time. Your story has touched me too much to ever forget about your family.
Lori I know how you feel when we got the results of Brianna's autopsy I had a lot of the same questions and feelings. I'm still asking my self some of them. We may always wonder what if but that's part of being a good parent. Nobody truly knows what it's like til they have been there themselves. I know you would have done anything for Drayke. Hopefully with time things will be a little better.
No one can understand what you are going through, but I hope that these words will offer you some comfort.
"Time heals what reason cannot.
In the end, time will change things. The intensity we experience when grief is new, where we can see nothing but our loss, and where every moment is filled with thoughts of the one who died will gradually diminish and become softer. Time forces the big picture of life back into our vision whether we like it or not. This happens in our lives all the time. Remember how when we first fell in love with someone, we were totally preoccupied with only that other person, until gradually a more balanced existence was restored. Or when we did (what we thought was) some terrible thing and we were sure everybody would never let us forget it, we came to find out a few months down the road that most people had forgotten the incident.
In the months (maybe years) following a loss, life will eventually start to re-emerge, and life on this planet will once again seem possible. This will not happen because we come to understand the death more clearly but because, with the passage of time, the unanswered questions will become easier to live with.
Time will not remove grief entirely. The scars of our grief will remain and we may find ourselves ambushed by a fresh wave of grief at any time. But needing to know the answers to the “why” questions won’t seem quite so important as it once was.
Time is a gift that we have taken for granted. We’ve been given our lives one moment at a time.
This is good.
Peace to you."
- from Pat Schwiebert - Director, Grief Watch (www.griefwatch.com)
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