The Journey To Jack

Each year around the kids' birthdays I get super-nostalgic about when they were born, how fast they are growing, the things that I love about them, the things that I have learned from them, etc.  Last night that happened to me around 3:30am... so I went ahead and started an entry that I intended to post on Jack's upcoming birthday.  Well, today my little buddy is home from school with a terrible stomach virus.  It is only noon, and he has thrown up 10 times since 7am.  It breaks my heart to watch him have to endure this illness.  I just want to take it from him and go through it for him.  Needless to say, he feels terrible, but in true Jack-style, he has been so sweet and thoughtful and appreciative of all that I have done to try to help him.  What did I do to deserve a kid like this?  Nothing.  I am just blessed.  So, through our time spent on the pallet that we have shared on the bathroom floor and the back rubs and the prayers, my love for him and my thankfulness to God for him has grown even deeper, and I am inspired to go ahead and share the birthday post that I began in the wee hours this morning....

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In March of 1998, Corey and  I "decided" to have baby #2.  With baby #1, we had "decided" and a month or two later, *poof*, there was a little blinking heartbeat on a sonogram machine which was followed by 9 months of an almost perfect pregnancy and a beautiful, healthy baby girl.  Okay, maybe not that easy... but you get my point. 

As far as I knew, fertility had never been a problem in our families... I come from a family with 4 kids, Corey comes from a family with 5.  I even have a great-grandmother that had something like 15 pregnancies that resulted in 12 kids.  I remember being so baffled each and every month when we were trying to get pregnant, and I would discover that I was, again, not pregnant.  It was a roller coaster ride, to say the least.  I can't believe it now, but I think that I was actually naive enough to think that once you "decide" to get pregnant... you actually do.  And was in case of our families... sometimes, you didn't even have to "decide". It just happens.    

14 months later, I finally thought that maybe I was pregnant.  I was going to my friend Kim's house that day and just happened to have a pregnancy test with me.  I guess that that is part of the journey to fertility... always having a test handy.  :)   She convinced me to take a test while I was at her house, and lo and behold... I was pregnant!  I was so excited and couldn't wait to share the news with Corey.  He was at work, so I had some time to kill while I waited for him to get home.  I went to the party store to get pink and blue balloons, decorated the house, dressed Allie in an "I'm A Big Sister" shirt, and waited for him to arrive.  When he finally did, I handed him a congratulations card, and we were so overjoyed to share the news that we were going to have a baby... finally.

The pregnancy was going normally... a little sickness, a lot of  back pain, a ton of exhaustion, but the baby was doing well.  One day in November, my neighbor that was also expecting heard about a place where we could go and have a new, upcoming type of sonogram... a 3-D sonogram.  We were so excited.  We went to the training facility, filled out some forms, she went in one room, and I went into another.  During my scan, the technician seemed confused and got her supervisor to come look at what she was seeing.  The supervisor also seemed confused and concerned, and when I asked what was going on, they said that they could not tell me.  I would have to wait for them to send a report to my doctor, and he would have to explain to me what they had seen.  It was a Friday, of course, so I was going to have to wait until Monday - at least - for him to get the report and let me know what was going on.  I was everything but at peace that whole night, and by the next morning, I was far beyond the state of worried.  I don't think I had ever been so scared.  I ended up calling my doctor, and in a move that I will always appreciate, he went to his office on his day off to read my report.  He called me back a few hours later to inform me that the scan that I had had shown that my baby had "dilated ventricles" in his brain.  I didn't know anything about ventricles or brains, but this sounded serious.  Fear was overtaking me.  My doctor said that I would need to see a perinatologist right way, and in a matter of days, I was in a fancy doctor's office at a hospital.  This perinatologist was straight-forward, matter-of-fact, and had little bedside manner.  After he scanned me, he gave me a list of 20-something things that could potentially be wrong with my baby including deafness, down syndrome, and many more.  Of the 20-something things on that list, the very last one was "normal variant".  It was our little piece of hope.  Maybe this baby was "normal".  Maybe.  When I got home with my list, I began searching the Internet about the first thing on my list that might be wrong... then the second... then the third.  My thinking was that if something were wrong, I wanted to be prepared and educated when it came time to make decisions.  Well, no "educating" was going on during that search... only waves and waves of fear.  Quickly, I could tell that the information was only going to overwhelm me and scare me, so I stopped researching.  I remember walking over to my couch, lying down, and after much begging and pleading, I surrendered my little one to the Lord.  Everything about his little brain and his little life was totally out of my hands anyway, but right then and there I released him into the Lord's.  I cannot explain it or understand it, but in that moment I actually was overcome with peace.  Over the next few months, I would fight fear like I never had before, but I was actively working out this process of surrender, and because of God's grace,  I was actually able to live in a place of peace much of the time.  

For the months that followed, we continued to see the perinatologist regularly and there was not much change on the size of the baby's ventricles.  We eventually had a hearing test on the baby that ruled out deafness.  We also had a scan that showed that the he probably did not have a cleft pallet or any heart problems - which ruled out many things.  That was good news but did not rule all of those 20-something things out.  We continued to pray and prepare for our little one that we had waited so long for, and on February 4, 2000 - after almost 2 years from the time that we "decided" to have a baby and 16 1/2 hours of labor followed by an emergency c-section  - Jackson Selke P. was born.  He was beautiful.

A few hours after his birth, he had a CAT scan on his brain that showed that everything looked perfect.  Praise God!  I will never know if he was in that category of "normal variant" or if he was miraculously touched by the hand of God, but I will always be beyond thankful for his health.  And at this time each year I am reminded of what a miracle he is and what a loving God I have to have to have given him to me.