I will start this week with one thing I forgot to mention in my first post…….
……What Not to Do in the Immediate Aftermath:
Work for an Organ Donor company. Call the parents of the deceased less than 2 hours after their infant’s death and ask if they would be willing to donate deceased infant’s heart. While arranging this, call the mother by the wrong name (Kylie) and assume the infant’s gender is male (when it’s female). Mention that you need to know as soon as possible about potential organ donation, prior to the autopsy scheduled for 8:30am the next day (“will you be awake at 7:30am to call us and let us know?”). Attempt to be nice, but still give the parents the impression you have the least amount of regard for their feelings and emotions they’re experiencing at that very moment.
I kid you not people, the above ACTUALLY happened. Jared and I are still livid about this. While we did give the idea of organ donation some thought, because we would have liked to help a baby in need - our gut reaction was not to donate any of Stevie’s organs…and we stuck with that instinct. At the time we had no idea what happened to her, so we wanted every possible chance to understand what went wrong…and that required all of her organs for the autopsy. Additionally, we were unsure if Stevie had some sort of infection, disease, or congenital malformation, and obviously would not want to donate her heart if that was the case.
Later that afternoon, we got a call from the Sheriff’s investigator informing us that the autopsy had been moved to 10:30am. Upon inquiring the reason for the time change, the investigator informed us it was because the Organ Donor company wanted to give us more time to make a decision. This infuriated us because at the time, we wanted to know AS SOON AS POSSIBLE any clues as to what may have happened – so we were annoyed that the Organ Donor company would take it upon themselves to move the timing of Stevie’s autopsy. The investigator further informed us that if we decided to donate Stevie’s heart then it would not be part of the autopsy and in turn we would be left wondering if something was wrong with her heart. So, we called the Organ Donor lady back, and informed her that we did not want to donate any of Stevie’s organs for all of the latter reasons.
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I woke up later Thursday morning, surprised that I actually slept. I think I got about 4 hours total. But soon the sadness crept in. I laid there in bed, paralyzed with racing thoughts:
What if this was preventable?
Does she know we loved her?
I am so empty…I wish I could just hold her
I have this postpartum body and no baby to show for it
I hope Jared is going to be alright…man he looks so cute sleeping – actually, he looks like Stevie sleeping
What are people going to think?
And tons of flashbacks…replaying a timeline of the last few days…trying to remember if we had any indication that death was impending.
I eventually made my way downstairs and started some coffee. I took a look at my Whoop data - 3% recovery… “whoa, wait, what?!” THREE PERCENT. For those of you that don’t know what a Whoop strap is, it’s basically a health monitoring device that gathers your heart rate data 52 times a second. It compiles your heart rate data alongside your strain (how hard your body worked throughout the day), and your sleep efficiency, to come up with a percentage of how recovered you are. Yes – it’s on a scale of 0-100% - and yes, you read that correctly the first time – my recovery was at 3% the day after Stevie died. I just want to point out that this is a key indicator that mental and emotional health can take a toll on your physical health as well.
Anyway, Thursday we “luckily” had things to keep us busy throughout the day, but the events were ones we were not looking forward to.
I wanted to call Omaha MilkWorks and figure out how to donate my frozen breastmilk I had begun stashing for when I eventually had to go to back to work and Stevie would go to daycare.
I wanted to call my five closest friends and tell them the awful news.
We needed to call the funeral home and begin arrangements. We also wanted to call Air Force Mortuary Affairs and find out what things they might assist us with.
The Medical Examiner (ME) would be completing the autopsy this morning as well, and we were anxiously awaiting a phone call from the Sheriff’s investigator, who said he would call if the ME found anything significant. I am not going to post too much at this time about Stevie’s autopsy…because even as I write this blog post, we are still waiting on the ME’s final report. I plan to provide a separate blog discussing the significant amount of hours I spent researching unique and rare disorders I thought Stevie might have. More to follow on that once we – hopefully – find out some answers that will bring us a little bit of closure.
So, I started with calling Omaha MilkWorks (think of them as “breastfeeding consultants") that morning. I had to figure out a safe way to quickly wean, and also do something that I thought might bring me some fulfillment in such a dark time. The manager picked up the phone; she sounded so sweet right from the beginning. I told her about my desire to donate and painstakingly informed her that it would be a one-time donation because my daughter had passed away. She immediately shared her condolences and said to me “Will you tell me about your daughter?”……..I froze. I had never been asked that before. I couldn’t think of anything. I was just….empty. I quickly reverted to telling her that we had no idea what happened and we were in such shock and Stevie had made it all the way to 8 weeks old so it was all so confusing. She thanked me for sharing, and also thanked me for my desire to donate. In retrospect, when I think about if people were to ask me about Stevie now, my response would be “She was perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
I ended up working through Denver Milk Bank, and Omaha MilkWorks did all the shipping of my breastmilk for me. I am proud to announce that about 240oz of my milk will go to NICU’s across the country for babies in need.
Throughout Thursday afternoon, Jared stood by while I worked through calling my five closest friends. Of those friends, three of them already had children, one of which had literally just delivered a baby girl two days before Stevie’s death, one of which had 6-month-old fraternal twins, and another was around 36 weeks pregnant with her first. I choked through every discussion with each one of them, pausing occasionally so I could cry. I felt so terrible – like I was causing them undue fear for their own children’s lives…and as if by me telling them about my own child’s death I might transfer some sort of bad luck to them. Thinking about that now, I realize how irrational those thoughts are….but it’s just what was going through my head at the time.
I cannot stress enough how important these women are to me. They allowed me to share some of the worst news I think anyone could share with them, and listened silently, non-judgmentally. I think they each know how much they mean to me, even when I don’t tell them that often. I just hope they know how thankful I am for their friendship and how helpful this “drill” of telling them over the phone was for me….I found a lot of strength in discussing Stevie’s passing with them.
My aunt and uncle came to visit that afternoon as well. Jared and I are so thankful to have them, along with my two cousins and their families, live in the local area. They sat with us as we walked them through everything that happened, and provided a listening ear and shoulder to cry on. I was so glad that they were one of the few families that got to meet Stevie and understand how wonderful she was.
Later in the evening my First Sergeant stopped by the house with the first dinner of our meal train our co-workers were providing. She also brought along a list of local support groups and contacts for grief counseling. It was so comforting to see her again (she had been at the house the first day); she is truly one of the nicest people I have ever worked with, and she is stellar at her job.
As we ate one of the most delicious meals ever (yeah, we told her she should be a chef when she retires from the military) we looked forward to the next day as Jared’s brothers would be coming to town. They decided to drop everything and begin driving in the middle of the night, so they would arrive shortly after we went to the funeral home on Friday to make arrangements and pick out Stevie’s urn.
One Positive Thing:
In our support group, we end each session with “one positive thing” – something positive that happened to us since the last time we spoke. So, I am going to try to incorporate that within this blog.
One positive thing that came from this was an increase in communication between Jared and me. We did not have communication issues prior to Stevie’s passing, but we have significantly increased the amount of sharing our feelings and thoughts with each other. In turn, we are becoming stronger as a couple.
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