We made love that day, lovingly, passionately and fearlessly. God had a plan and this was the day it was to take place. I didn’t need any test to tell me I was pregnant. I knew the very minute of conception. But to be sure I took a home pregnancy test when I was five days pregnant. Now I know this is kind of crazy to take a test five days after conception, when I hadn’t even missed my period yet. It was positive!
The day that I found out that I was pregnant was also the same day that I got baptized. That was so awesome to be crucified with Christ into the water and raised to be a new creation. I believe that baptism is an outward expression of an inward change. And I chose to announce to the world that I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. It was a very blessed day.
At about seven weeks pregnant, because of having such a high risk pregnancy, the doctor ordered an ultrasound. I asked the technician how many babies there were (I just had a feeling and hoped in my heart that there were twins). At first she said only one, and I was a bit disappointed, but then she saw another sack, and confirmed that I was miraculously carrying twins! I was in shock but had so much joy.
I came home and left the ultrasound pictures on the front door so the first thing James would see was twins. He was so excited. We were truly blessed; this was the grace of God—a miracle.
The pregnancy was difficult. The first trimester was extremely painful, because my uterus was attached to my bowel due to scar tissue. It put me in agonizing pain twenty-four hours a day for three months. My husband, once again, had to take care of Justin and myself. So now this is the third time since we had been married that I was on bed rest. It was painful, depressing and lonely. I felt once again like a burden. And my doctor informed me that as of twenty-seven weeks of pregnancy, he was going to put me on complete bed rest to prevent premature labor that I suffered with Justin.
Somewhere in the second trimester, my organs detached, and I began to live life again. Actually, I felt great, there’s nothing like that second trimester of pregnancy, for me anyway. I’ve never felt physically better than during that segment of time.
Out of the blue, my therapist called me one day. He thought I was healed of my abuses, since I had convinced him, James, and even myself that I was. In fact, my therapist chose me, out of the hundreds of patients he had over the fifteen or so years of his practice, to share my entire testimony to a room full of therapists in training. I was amazed at his request, but I accepted and asked the Lord to help me. I wrote down key points, but the Lord blessed the entire testimony. James was so overwhelmed by emotions that he couldn’t even speak. At this time of the testimony, I only knew of the abuse when I was ten by my neighbor up until the adult years. But whatever I said really touched these people, because several of them came to me afterwards and shared their gratitude of my honesty. It wasn’t that I was trying to fool anybody; I really thought I was healed. The problem was I put my faith in man— my therapist, and not in the God of the Bible, Jesus Christ.
A few weeks after that event, James and I realized that we needed to find a new home. We couldn’t live comfortably in a two-bedroom condo any longer. So we went house hunting. I was twenty-five weeks pregnant. We decided to look for land and purchase a modular house. One day we traveled about two and a half hours away to look at modular houses. After leaving one place, on our way to another, we passed the exit and as we were going to turn around and go to another site of modular houses, we both knew that we were not to go there, and that we were to head home. The Lord spoke to us both that day. We didn’t know it was the Lord’s voice, but we knew, adamantly, not to go to any more sites.
We went home and the very next day I went into pre-term labor—at twenty-five weeks pregnant. My contractions were ten minutes apart, and I was rushed to the hospital. They stopped my contractions after hours of medical treatment, but I dilated two centimeters and was in great danger of losing my babies. From that day on, I was on complete bed rest, with monitoring of my contractions and medication. I was so scared I was going to loose these precious miracles. We already knew what we were having—a boy and a girl.
I was on bed rest, depending on everyone else to take care of me once again. I wasn’t able to take care of Justin or run our business to make that $300 a month payment. Yet again James wouldn’t help with the business, which left me with the burden. How selfish could he be? When I asked or begged him for help, he refused. When I told him I was worried about the loan payment, he would say that I needed to trust God. The problem was, he wasn’t doing anything to contribute or help the situation. It was very stressful and I felt that he didn’t care what it was doing to me. Finally, as I said, the stress of it got to be so much that I had to make a choice whether I was going to let the business go or lose my babies. I was not going to lose my babies; I loved them, and they were so important to me. I was still scared about ruining our credit, and I begged James to help me with the business, but he wouldn’t make deliveries or run errands, or anything. So I just gave up. I couldn’t work when I went on complete bed rest. I remember being so angry with James for laying such a burden on me and not providing a way to pay the loan.
I was on complete bed rest and wasn’t even aloud to come down the steps. I could only get up, take a shower and then lay in bed all day long. It was going to be like that from twenty-five weeks until our goal of at least thirty-eight weeks. That’s what we were praying for, although my doctor would have been thrilled if we could even just get to thirty-six weeks.
So I stayed in bed, scared of losing the babies, feeling like a burden, feeling all alone, and extremely depressed. But this time I wasn’t alone, Jesus was with me. He was with me the last time too, but I just didn’t realize it. Jesus comforted me and people from church called and came by. They made dinners for us, and Pastor Gary came and gave me communion. He prayed with me, and the church taped the sermons and gave them to James for me to listen to and be fed by.
It was really a blessed time, this time, but I missed raising Justin, and I was made to feel like a burden from James. Since I had Jesus, I didn’t go into a full-on depression. That in itself was a miracle. The days went by slowly, one after another. The excitement of the week was when I got to go to the doctor. Isn’t that sad to look forward to going to the doctor? At least I was out of the house.
I stayed on bed rest until one night, when I was thirty-three weeks pregnant, my contractions wouldn’t stop. I don’t care how much water I drank or what medication I was on at home, they wouldn’t stop. I was rushed to the hospital and put on Magnesium Sulfate, which slows every organ in your body down, not only your uterus but your lungs as well. I call it a fate worse than death.
Finally after many hours under the torture of this horrible drug, the doctors finally stopped my contractions, but there was no way that they were going to let me leave that hospital until I had those babies. So I spent another week, including Thanksgiving, in the hospital.
The day after Thanksgiving at 3:00 in the morning, I went into labor again, this time it couldn’t be stopped. James was on his way to the hospital as I was being prepped for an emergency C-section. As the doctor was inserting the epidural, James rushed in and was prepped to be in the operating room. And at 4:41 a.m. on November 26, 1993, our son, Kevin, was born, weighing 5 lbs, 3 oz and at 4:43 a.m. our daughter, Kaylie, was born, weighing 6 lbs, 5 oz. They were beautiful and so fragile. Our daughter was born not breathing but the doctors revived her back to health. And our son, this poor little fragile thing, was put on a respirator because his lungs hadn’t matured. This was the scariest, most desperate thing that I had ever seen.
Both my babies were hooked to monitors, and they both had guavage tubes in their noses for them to be fed. Neither of them knew how to swallow. I only saw them for a moment as the nurses wheeled my bed through the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, but I’ll never forget the feeling of helplessness that came over me. After this time, until exactly forty-eight hours later, I was not able to hold my bundles of joy. I had a cold, and I posed a danger to their well-being.
As I lay in the hospital bed awaiting some kind of confirmation of their status, all my friends and relatives got to hold them, everyone except me. This broke my heart, but I waited patiently for those long forty-eight hours to end. And when it did at 4:41 a.m., exactly forty-eight hours following their birth, I wheeled myself down to their place of residency, NICU, and I held those incredible miracles that God had blessed me with. Words could not describe my joy.
That joy shortly darkened when I was told that I would be going home without my babies. It was probably the hardest thing, emotionally, that I ever had to do. That was a very traumatic experience for me. The one thing that I needed was for my husband to empathize with me. After all, they were his babies too. But instead of us comforting each other, we just lived our own pain all by ourselves. It was a very lonely time. I remember him remarking that they were his babies too you know. That just made me feel, once again, so separate.
It was well worth the wait, even though I had to electronically pump breast milk all day long and James would take it to the hospital in the morning. In the afternoon I would go to the hospital myself and feed them. It was exhausting, but after ten days of worrying, pumping, feeling joy from their birth, and sorrow from the loss of them not being with me, they finally arrived home to complete our family; the family that the Lord had created.
They came home, and there I was a mother of three babies in diapers, three to feed and change each and every day. I was not allowed to go out of the house with my kids, because of the threat of the twins getting sick, since it was winter. The kids and I were literally stuck in the house for three months, including the time we couldn’t go anywhere due to the ice storms that we had that winter. So, in reality, I was inside for five months if you count bed rest and the hospital. I got major cabin fever.
The days went by, filled with a lot of work, a lot of emotions, and much exhaustion. Every weekend was hell in our house because of the way James treated me. He would start out Friday evening after he got home from work. He would ridicule me, or totally neglect me. He would try to start arguments the whole weekend from Friday through Sunday due to his depressions that were so bad that sometimes he would sit in the dark for hours.
I nursed both babies for approximately four months. Shortly after I stopped nursing them, I was riddled with pains of endometriosis again. I went to my doctor, and we scheduled a hysterectomy at twenty-nine years of age. He was very against doing this procedure to such a young woman, but it was inevitable, and we both knew it.
The surgery was to be a two-day stay at the hospital, which, unfortunately turned into eight days. I had internal bleeding and received a blood transfusion. I was in a lot of pain and very scared. I didn’t know what was wrong. My temperature wouldn’t go down, and I had already been through almost every test there was in that hospital. I would say my faith wasn’t really strong at that point. But even when I didn’t have the faith, God did, and he faithfully gave the doctors the correct diagnosis and then I was released. Of course I was to be put on bed rest again. James took care of me, begrudgingly, along with Justin, who was a little over two and Kevin and Kaylie, who were about eight months old. It was a very tense and lonely time for me. While recovering from my hysterectomy, our relationship was strained even more because of the fears I had, which had manifested themselves into pure resentment from all my unmet needs. Sex was not even an option. It wasn’t a thought, and it definitely wasn’t a desire.
Shortly after recovering from my hysterectomy, I experienced a very familiar pain in my abdomen, could it be, yes it was, endometriosis. It was an extremely rare case that reoccurred after a full hysterectomy. The only solution to this dilemma was not to take any estrogen, because it was the estrogen in my body that was causing the endometriosis in the first place. But by not ingesting estrogen on a daily basis, my body would go into a state of induced menopause. And that is exactly what happened - menopause at age twenty-nine: hot flashes, mood swings, the whole package. That was all our relationship needed was a very moody wife. And sure enough through the mood swings I suffered a deep depression.