Surrender/Trust

This was written by Chad on Sunday:

Yesterday was a good day. I (Chad) have been immobile because of my broken foot, but considering that, we all had a great day as a family. Somewhere around 6pm, Stephanie said that she needed to lay down for a few minutes, because she wasn't feeling well (I was already laying down, foot elevated, on ice). She said that her stomach was bothering her, and it went from being very uncomfortable to excruciating pain quickly. I asked her to try to describe the pain, and she could hardly talk through her tears and being out of breath. She said that it was pain like she had never had before. We knew that it was serious.

Just 10-12 days prior we found out that we lost our baby through miscarriage. Although we were confident that everything had "passed" from the miscarriage, we were now starting to wonder if this stomach pain episode was related to it. We made the decision to go to the ER. Thank God Stephanie's mom Lola was there since neither one of us were able to drive. I stayed home with the boys.

Well... after several hours of waiting, with no word about anything, Lola offered to come and pick me up. My Mom came to watch the boys. We had hoped to be back at the hospital before the doctor told Stephanie the results of her CT Scan.... but we were too late. We asked her if she had heard anything and she said that she has internal bleeding. That definitely is not what we had hoped to hear. Her blood pressure was 78/40. Those two are definitely not a good combination. Especially when you don't know what the source of the internal bleeding is.

After the doctors and nurses did very extensive questioning to try to get an idea of what could have possibly triggered this, the only thing that we kept coming back to was the recent pregnancy. The doctor said that "theoretically" it is possible that a pregnancy in the uterus, like we had, which miscarried, could have had a twin, which didn't make it to the uterus. An ectopic pregnancy is when the fertilized egg does not make it to the uterus by traveling through the fallopian tube, but instead latches on to the fallopian tube. It becomes a ticking time-bomb because of its location, and eventually the fallopian tube ruptures.

The odds of having twins are about 3 in 100. The odds of having an ectopic pregnancy is 1 in 50 (both stats taken from About.com). The doctor said that the odds of having twins, with one being in the uterus and the other being ectopic is about 1 in 10,000. He had never known it to happen before, just knew that it was a very faint possibility.

They wanted to start the surgery as soon as possible. They knew that she had lost a whole lot of blood, and they sent for her to have some blood transfusion units from the blood bank. The blood bank said that it would not be able to get the blood to us as quickly as the doctor needed it, so they had to go into the emergency blood bank, which is Type O Negative (universal) blood, that they had on-site.

Stephanie was taken to surgery at approximately 1am. She was terrified (so was I). I would have given anything to trade places with her. The last time that she had surgery was with Luke's C-Section, which was not a good experience at all (once again, that's a whole other story). We prayed over her, with the surgeon present, and it was comforting to hear an "Amen" from him.

We waited in the Surgery Waiting Room for about 2 1/2 hours. There was lots, and lots, and lots of prayer. In and out of the waiting room. It is a very hard thing to surrender something. Especially something that you love. Especially something that you cherish and hold dear. Life without Stephanie is something that I cannot even allow my thoughts to explore. She is such an amazing wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend. And although I wouldn't want to experience one minute of life without her, I had to give her to Jesus.

I did this in faith. I did it in faith that God is faithful. I did this knowing that three doctors were operating on my best friend with the odds of what they were looking for being 1 in 10,000. Although those numbers are not very good, I know that God is VERY GOOD. He is able to do exceedingly and abundantly above all that we could ever ask or think.

The good doctors came to the waiting room and gave us the news that she was in fact 1 of the 10,000. I think she's more like 1 in 1,000,000. The fallopian tube had ruptured. They vacuumed out 6 pints of blood that she had lost from internal bleeding. That's just an outrageously high amount of blood to lose. They had to remove one of her fallopian tubes. That was basically it. The surgery was very successful.

They gave her 3 pints of blood from transfusion. They said that she's young and healthy enough to come up with the other 3 on her own. It has just now been a little over 24 hours from when the initial pains began. Steph hadn't eaten since lunch yesterday, but she just finished an all-liquids dinner. She's looking much, much better as time progresses. She's getting color back. She looks alert. She's wanting to sit up.

The doctor said that leaving tomorrow is a possibility, but a more realistic day would be Tuesday. It all depends on her blood count levels getting back up to where they need to be, and her ability to keep regular foods down.

I cannot thank you enough for those of you who spent most of your night last night petitioning Heaven with me for Jesus to rescue my precious wife. He certainly did, and He is worthy of all praise and thanksgiving.