Counting Our Losses: Born Still but Stillborn

I am flat on my back, lying on a hospital gurney, about 42 weeks pregnant give or take a few days and my doctor has wheeled me through a long narrow hallway. Everything around me is white including the walls and the blanket that is covering the lower half of my body. We come to a stop directly in front of an ultrasound machine. The doctor is looking it over and asks a nurse if she knows how to turn it on.

Years later this scene will repeat itself over and over again in my head until it no longer seems real and I have to confirm that it actually did happen the way I remember it. It feels too much like a really bad Saturday Night Live skit.

Several minutes pass and one of the nurses gets the machine humming and there is cold jelly being rubbed on my stomach and the ultrasound wand is pushed against me. The screen fills up with black and white images of my baby son but I barely get a chance to look at him before they quickly turn it off again. There are bright lights and forms to sign and I must agree to general anesthesia because they need to get the baby out now.

None of this feels like it is really happening to me.

Jason is standing near my head and then just as suddenly he is gone and someone is putting a mask over my mouth and telling me to breathe. Darkness and silence prevail.

My eyes start to open and I am blinded by white light. I see a faint outline of several people standing around me and I try to speak. My words are like the lopsided drawings my four year old often gifts me. My speech is at first indecipherable and I try again and again until finally I am able to pierce two words together as a question, "My son?" My eyes search the faces of the nurses and I am struck with the icy realization that nobody in the room will make eye contact with me.

A nurse finally answers. "We have to get you stabilized and then the doctor will come and talk to you about your son."

He must have Downs Syndrome, I am thinking. Oh god, that will be hard, but we will handle it. Our family will be okay. Or he has brain damage that must be it. Please God, let Dylan just be a little less than perfect. These thoughts fill my head, a prayer that is whispered in the dark and within a few minutes I am climbing back into the safety of darkness and more sleep.

I am just starting to open my eyes and I can see Jason walking toward me. His face looks strange. His eyes look so dark and I am having trouble understanding what he is saying to me as he approaches. "He's gone," he says. "Dylan did not make it." His eyes lock mine and I see such pain reflected back at me that I feel ashamed and alone and words just don't exist for all of the feelings that are there. It hurts to look at him, to see him looking so small. I just can't take it and I mumble a few words and cry out. I am aware that he makes a few phone calls to tell his family and then I fall asleep again. Darkness. Silence. The closest thing I have to anything that seems real.

There are voices around me and I hear someone calling my name. "She has to wake up. She has to hold him." I open my eyes and someone has placed the baby on my chest. I look down and see a shock of black hair, bluish looking skin and a soft little duck print baby blanket that is wrapped around his body. "Oh," I say as I touch the top of his head and the bottom of the blanket. Tears are falling and I am barely aware that Jason and the three midwives are standing nearby. I try to stay awake so I can hold the baby, but exhaustion and the drugs that have been pumped into my body pull me right back into the darkness.

My eyes open and it seems like some hours have passed. The midwives are gone. Jason is walking around the room holding Dylan. I can hear him talking gently. He sees that I am awake and he carries Dylan over to me and places him against me again so I can try to memorize his little features. He's pulled the baby blanket back so that we can look at his perfect little fingers and toes. Dylan's skin is wrinkled and dry. I inhale, trying to smell him but all I smell is the antiseptic smell of a hospital ward. I am even robbed of his scent.

I drift in and out of consciousness.

A nurse is standing next to me. She asks if she can take his body. I tell her no that I need more time. She leaves and I try so very hard to stay awake. I have so many things I want to tell him. I whisper that I love him to the sky and back and to the moon and back and I tell him about his big sister and his cats. I tell him I am sorry. These are sacred moments, probably some of the most meaningful moments of my life. They are gone all too quickly and the nurse is back again asking if she can take him. All I can do is nod.

A few days later, I leave the hospital with some cards and flowers and a purple satin memory box. Jason and I leave without our son and head out into August sunlight and a life that will never be the same again.

I did not want this to be my fight. Almost nine years ago, the word "stillborn" became personal.

After Dylan's death, I tried to find out how many babies died annually in the United States. I've always researched things and I figured it would be a simple task. I spent months searching Internet sites and learned that there was no set protocol, no national standards and we were not counting babies. The best we had were guesses. I kept seeing "one in every hundred births" and sometimes I read "26,000 babies a year". Just speculation.

As it got closer to what should be Dylan's ninth birthday, I thought surely we would know by now. I have waited all these years. Surely someone is counting.

Many more Internet searches later and I see that we are still estimating. Babies die at birth and in many states families are not even given a "birth certificate", although they must bury their child. How do you bury someone for whom the state does not even count as having ever lived? Nine years later and we still do not know how many wealthy industrialized American babies are carried to term and die at birth.

Families of stillborn children count every missed birthday, every holiday, what should have been the first day of school and so on.

When will we start counting?