Haidyn Hope Aguirre, Our Guardian Angel

{This entry has been saved on my computer for almost a month. I had a rough night one early February day and needed to get my emotions out so I wrote. The result is the following piece: I’m warning you, it’s incredibly emotional…grab a box of tissues.}

My doctor had recommended, on top of the testing being performed on Baby#4, that Mike and I each have chromosome analyses done. So I trekked off to the lab one day to have vials and vials worth of blood drawn from my terrible veins and spend some more time with Jackie, the world’s best phlebotomist (She and I had been spending a considerable amount of time together lately).

It seemed like an eternity waiting for the results from Baby#4’s chromosome analysis as well as my own. I NEEDED ANSWERS! Why did this keep happening to us? Why had we heard a healthy heartbeat and then heard nothing? Why can’t our babies live to see our loving faces?

My doctor called me the morning of Wednesday, February 1, 2012. I was on Prep in my classroom when an unknown number showed up on my cell phone. Concerned it was a parent of one of my students, I answered. It was my doctor making a phone call that would replay in my head a million times in a few short days. The results were in…my chromosome analysis came back normal (GREAT news) so now we would just have to test Mike, but the baby wasn’t so lucky. Instead of the normal 46 chromosomes humans are built with (23 from mom, 23 from dad), our precious Baby#4 had 69. Wait….what?? I asked her how this could be possible and she told me there was no real answer to that question. She left me to process the information but also told me that Baby#4’s chromosomes were XXX.

I had a hard time processing so I did the only thing I knew to do at that point: I Googled. The information I found left a gaping hole in my heart and a pit in my stomach. Baby#4 suffered from a condition called Triploidy, 69 chromosomes. Furthermore, this condition is always fatal, usually resulting in miscarriage at 20 weeks gestation. A small percentage will make it full term but are often stillborn. An even smaller percentage live to see their one month birthday and only a few reported cases have lived to see their first birthday.

ALWAYS FATAL….those words felt like they were literally burned into my retinas. I knew that I should be thankful that Baby#4 wouldn’t have to suffer a condition that wouldn’t allow him/her to live, however, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was nothing we could have done for him/her.

Furthermore, I wanted some answers as to how this could have happened. Up until this point, I was blaming God. He was the easiest target since we had no answers and were awaiting test results. What I read next left me short of breath: Triploidy can result either from a single egg being fertilized by two sperm or from an error in cell division causing either the egg or the sperm to have 46 chromosomes at the time of fertilization (taken from http://miscarriage.about.com/od/congenitaldisorders/p/triploidy.htm) . I have been told several times after sharing my story that there is nothing Mike or I could have done and that this is not our fault, but literally the ONLY thought running through my head was the following, “Wait….we did this to our baby?! We are the reason he/she is no longer with us?!” Most of you reading are going to agree with all of the people that told us that we are not the reason Baby#4’s life ended unexpectedly.

However, remember when I said I needed someone to blame? Guess who the new scapegoat was? You got it….my husband and I. Now, because I would NEVER want anyone to feel the way I was feeling at that very second, I didn’t place an ounce of blame on Mike. I placed it all on me (my friends will tell you that it’s just in my nature to buck up, buttercup, and blame myself rather than making someone else feel the pain).

After taking a few short breaths and moving the trash can from in front of my desk to underneath my chin, I made a VERY difficult call to my husband. He reassured me that this was what God had in mind for us, that He wouldn’t throw anything at us that we couldn’t handle, and that he loved me unconditionally. I emailed him the link to the website with all of the information and he told me he would read it as soon as we hung up.

The rest of the day, really, is a blur. I need to digress for a minute to tell you about the high school student from the Tech Center that has spent a considerable amount of time in my room since the New Year. She is a family friend and a girl that I love DEARLY! I really don’t know what I would have done without her when we lost precious Baby#4. Anyway, she was with me that day, lesson planning and the like, when I received the phone call from my doctor. She didn’t say much, but her silence was her greatest gift to me. She supported me while I Googled and listened as I reasoned and cried. She really is the BEST.

Anyway, the rest of the day…..I asked one of the greatest people I know, and a coworker, what I should do. I felt like at any moment I was going to vomit and spend a decent amount of time crying uncontrollably, in that order. Should I go home? Attempt to get a substitute (we are experiencing a MAJOR shortage in substitute teachers so I knew it was highly unlikely)? Said friend was wonderful and told me that no matter which decision I made as to the rest of my day, it would be the best for me. I decided to “Buck Up, Buttercup” (as my team and I tell our students when they are suddenly “too sick” to work) and finish my day. The plan was to leave as soon as possible at the end of the day. I did just that.

I spent the rest of the night grieving a loss I had not yet grieved, and trying to wrap my head around all of this new knowledge. To say that I didn’t get much sleep that night is an understatement. I didn’t get ANY sleep that night. At 5:30 the morning of Thursday, February 2, 2012, I called my boss and told her that I had received some devastating news the previous day about my most recent pregnancy (she was incredibly supportive throughout this entire journey) and that I wasn’t about to try coming in and put in for a substitute teacher, all the while crossing my fingers that SOMEONE would accept my job. I spent the rest of the day in that Sam-shaped spot (see previous entries “Grief and all that jazz…” and “Grief and all that jazz…part 2) on my couch sobbing uncontrollably.

If you’ve been following our story, you will know that this was week three after the loss of Baby#4 and that, while I had accepted our loss, I had not yet grieved it. That day, I grieved like it was going out of style. It felt good to cry for hours on end and dream about what could have been. The next morning, I returned to work, feeling a little stronger, a little less weight on my shoulders, but remembering that hole in my heart that was only filled when I thought of Baby#4’s short little life and how he/she was now in a better place.

Now would probably be the best time to tell you that, while I was Googling the information regarding 69 chromosomes, I was also remembering my high school biology class. Why, you ask? Well, I remember studying chromosomes in that class (science was never my strong subject but at least this stuck with me!) and I distinctly remember that XX was female and XY was male. So, did that mean that our Baby#4, XXX, was a female? I had to be certain so I of course Googled…I was right. Darn Mr. Kochenderfer and his filling my head with all of that knowledge…I actually knew what I was talking about this time and it devastated me! We were going to have another little girl…Harper was going to have a little sister…Mike would have had two girls to walk down the aisle. None of that mattered now.

Mike was WONDERFUL during all of this. He listened to my “What-Ifs”, dried my tears, cried with me, held me when I was feeling blue, and in general took excellent care of his crazy grief-stricken wife. We decided together that since we knew the gender of Baby#4, we should name her. This notion came partially from a book I had read, Heaven Is For Real, and partially from an all-too-vivid dream about my baby in Heaven without a name. We spent some careful hours and days thinking about this. We had started discussing names after our successful ultrasound in December and realized that the name we had chosen for another girl would be the ONLY name we would ever want for this baby: Haidyn. We named Baby#4 Haidyn Hope Aguirre.

The following was 100% Mike’s idea and I love him even more for it: We made a shadow box when Harper came home from the hospital. It included her coming home outfit, our hospital bands, her footprints, and our first picture as a family. We had Haidyn’s first pictures and hospital bands from my surgery, along with the beautiful poem that was included in his aunt and uncle’s gift to us (See first post, “Angel in my pocket”). He told me that she was our child and we needed to give her the same place in our home that we had given Harper.

We set out Saturday, February 4, 2012 to Hobby Lobby and spent an hour picking out the perfect accessories for Haidyn’s shadow box. That night, we assembled. It now hangs with Harper’s shadow box, only a few feet from our bedroom. I kiss it each night and tell Haidyn how much I love her. Harper blows her kisses in heaven before she goes to bed.

Haidyn Hope Aguirre, precious Baby#4 and Guardian Angel #3.