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Continued Maternal Care

 Because of Imelda's diagnosis, the midwives I was seeing dropped me pretty quickly.  They didn't give us any guidance of where to go next.  It was a scary couple of weeks, processing the daunting Trisomy 18 diagnosis and looking for a doctor who would take on my care.  One of my friends recommended a wonderful prolife doctor who happened to take our insurance!  He is a maternal fetal specialist and OBGYN who is very prolife.  He was very kind and caring and such a blessing during my difficult pregnancy.  Dr. A would pray with us at the appointments and remind us that Imelda is God's child and only He will decide when to call her home.  Our prayer during the rest of the pregnancy was to have her baptized immediately after birth and to be able to hold her alive in our arms.

The next few months of my pregnancy were very, very hard.  All my hopes and dreams of Juliette having a sister to care for and become best friends with melted away.  The excitement of finally having another girl disappeared, and worry, anxiety and fear replaced it.  I would just sit on the couch feeling numb with tears streaming down my face.  The easiest way for me to cope was to plan for the worst.  We looked into burial plots, caskets, and called a mortuary.  I picked out a baptismal gown that Imelda could be buried in.  The only prayer I had the strength to pray over and over again was "Jesus, I trust in you."  I prayed daily for God to give me the strength to carry this very heavy and unbearable cross that he was handing me.  It was the hardest time in my life.  But God is so good and He carried us and comforted us.   I kept reminding myself that God made Imelda this way.  He made her just the way he wanted her to be, and that is with Trisomy 18.  It was comforting to remind myself that it wasn't anything I did wrong or could change and that He had a purpose for her life.

We discussed Imelda with our children, hugged them when they were sad and told them to have faith and pray that we would be able to hold her and bring her home to be with all of us.  After a couple months the initial shock and pain were not as sharp.  We carried forward as best we could and devoted our time to caring for our other 10 children while we continued to prepare for the unknown future.

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