What's next for us......

Now I am 18 weeks pregnant with a terminally ill baby that hasn't even had a chance to see the world yet. I am trying to treat this pregnancy as "normal" as I possibly can, but I know in my heart that I may not even get to see her with her eyes open. There is nothing to be excited about. That is how my mind feels. My heart on the other hand could careless if she was born with every defect known to man just as long as she survives.
I decided that her life began NOW, not when she is delivered, but NOW! I immediately began calling her by her name, Rabecca Diane Hoffman. I sang to her a lot. "My girl" was my favorite to sing and "you are my sunshine ". I talked to her all the time and I would make sure that she knew that her mommie loved her very much and that I would trade places with her in a split second. So many times I wished for the Lord to take me home and let lil Becca butt thrive here with her daddy and brothers and sisters. I hear people say" I'd trade places with you if I could", but do they really mean it? Probably not. It's just a way of saying "i don't know what to say". I have been guilty of that myself , but not this time. I would gladly have taken her place.
The doctor visits became more frequent as the weeks went along. I began to feel her kick a lot more. We went for ultrasounds every 4 to 5 weeks for my piece of mind. I needed to know what they were seeing with her. I think that it was the second one after we got the news, they sent in a specialist to look at her heart to look for malformations, holes, clogged arteries ect. He looked for at least an hour and had the damdest look on his face. He said "This just puzzles me, I don't see anything wrong with this baby's heart!" He over looked her body and then called in another specialist who looked her body over from top to bottom, and found nothing! Amazing love is what that was. God made her perfect......for the moment. We left that office with such hope that we called everyone we knew and bragged on her as if she had just found a cure for cancer! Proud parents to say the very least! "Maybe they are wrong!" Another glimmer of hope.....
By the time I was 24 weeks pregnant we got another set back. Rabecca had slowed down her growing. She was not on schedule any more she was 2.5 weeks behind on her growth :( Still though no clubbed feet, no cleft lip and palate, both kidneys were present, her stomach was in tacked, and she was opening and closing her hands! GO BECCA!! She was small but thriving very well. We were told that IF she was born alive she would be very small, somewhere around 3 to 4 lbs mark.
Now I am further along and everyone kept talking about "the baby shower". WHAT? A WHAT? How dare them! I knew in my heart that she was very sick and I would not bring her home. I didn't want to go through with a celebration. My heart was broken into! What am I gonna do? I told Joey how I was feeling and his advice to me was to go ahead with it and treat this just like any other normal pregnancy. His thought was that they still could be wrong about all of this. My feeling was what's the point? If I do have a shower I am gonna have to look at things that I would never get the chance to use with her. I took his advice and I had a shower anyway. I made sure that everyone knew that she would be very under weight, and that I needed small things to wrap her in. The big day came. I tried to chin up and pretend that everything was just fine. That was until I came out of my kitchen to see gifts everywhere, balloons, streamers, the booties cake, and the diaper cake. I got a huge lump in my throat and a eerie weak feeling. I did what the guest of honor should, I smiled, I welcomed everyone, I awwed at the cake and other things around me. I began to take my seat and open presents. Gift after gift I opened. The more I opened them the madder I got. Everything that was there was for normal sized babies! Had these people lost their minds?! Didn't the listen to me? Didn't they get it?! Rabecca was going to be TINY! This stuff seemed so big that I could have fit a 3 year old in them! I just wanted to stand in the middle of the room and scream to the top of my lungs "GET WHAT YOU CAME WITH AND GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" I didn't.... I just stuck it out and when everyone was gone I sobbed, and sobbed. What was I going to do with all this stuff? I packed it all into boxes and hung the clothes in the closet never to be touched again.
I was so in love with my baby, but I couldn't find it in me to be excited. All that I could feel was anger. Anger towards everyone. Especially myself, after all I was carrying her. This had to be something that was wrong with me. I had done this to her.
Joey builds homes for a living. He had built a home that sat empty in a very exclusive subdivision for a little over a year. Finally the home was sold to a doctor by the name of Reese Clark. Joey happened to be talking to Dr. Clarks wife and he told her the story about Rabecca. She immediately told him that her husband was the head of neonatal research in the hospital that Rabecca was to be born at, and gave him Dr. Clarks phone number. We called him as soon as we could and he wanted to meet with us. To our amazement he was known world wide and if you wanted anyone to care for your baby he was the one! He wanted to meet with Joey and I as soon as he came back into town that week, so we did. He was wonderful. He toured us through NICU and let us see where our daughter would be if she cas able to come to NICU. He didn't want us to be shocked by all the machines and tubes that are in there hooked to the sick babies. He wanted this to be as gentle a transition as possible. He was wonderful.
Now came the hard part of the meeting. He asked us if we wanted to intervene or if we wanted to choose comfort care for her. "What's the difference?" I asked. He gently explained to me that intervention meant that they would take drastic measures to save her life and that comfort care meant she would get a little oxygen, and anything to keep her comfortable until she passed. My God how do you make that decision? My options were to invade her body with machines and tubes and hope to keep her alive for one more minute or to do nothing and let her go. How do you make that decision?