Jillian Harper Foster - Part 3

After telling everyone about our daughter Jillian Harper we continued on with the pregnancy. We started to design the nursery, picked out a crib, ordered wallpaper samples and made an attempt at starting a registry.

We continued going to doctor appointments, and had your anatomy scan on March 19th. During this appointment we found out that there were some concerns - Jillian had an enlarge kidney, fluid sac in her brain, and possible issues with her heart. At that time the doctor only wanted to monitor progress and for us to have a cardiologist look at Jillian's heart. We scheduled a follow-up appointment with our perinatologist, an appointment with the cardiologist, and an appointment with mu doctor for April 2nd. We would get the answers we were looking for and have some information regarding what we could do for Jillian. We passed the milestone of 20 weeks - what we thought would be half way to meeting our baby girl.

On April 2, 2014 I was 21 Weeks and 4 Days pregnant. This was the day our beautiful baby girl would be born. At around 4:00am I woke up to use the bathroom - there was nothing unusual about this as it seemed to happen in the middle of each night. After going back to bed I felt like I had wet myself, but knew that wasn't possible. I went to the bathroom again, was worried and called my doctor, Dr. Pearl to see what to do. I left a message with the answering service and took a shower to clean myself up. While I was in the shower Jonathan answered a call and Dr. Pearl told us to head to the hospital.

We checked-in to the ER and they sent us up to Labor and Delivery. At that time the nurse checked and confirmed that I was leaking amniotic fluid. She then checked Jillian's heart beat - which was very strong at this point. After answering questions for the nurse, they took me to have an ultrasound to see what was going on. The ultrasound revealed that there was no amniotic fluid left, but that Jillian was still doing fine. My doctor explained that amniotic fluid is needed for the development of the baby. Without it the lungs will not develop, and at only 21W4D it is not possible for Jillian to survive. We went through all of the scenarios but decided that for the time being we would wait and see if the amniotic fluid would restore itself. The last thing we were willing to do was give up on Jillian. As long as she was willing to fight, so were we. By this time it was around 11:00am and all we could do was wait.. wait to see if the fluid would replenish... or I would go into labor.. at this point we didn't know what would happen.

We debated about when we should tell our families what was going on, and decided that we needed to call everyone. We called my dad first, then Jonathan's parents, then our siblings. We decided to wait until the next day to tell Lindsey what was going on because she was celebrating Todd's birthday and we didn't want to ruin his birthday.

At around 2:30pm I was starting to have consistent contractions and was put on a monitor. Over time the contractions were more frequent and definitely more painful. Our nurse called Dr. Pearl to check me around 6:00pm and he confirmed that I was in active labor. We discovered that I would not be able to have an epidural and that I would have to go through a natural child birth. Jonathan and I started looking through ways to get through child birth, and  I tried to relax as much as possible.

Jillian Harper Foster was born sleeping on April 2, 2014 at 11:57pm. She was 11.5 inches long and weighed 1 pound 3 ounces. She was a perfect, beautiful baby girl and we never imagined it possible to love someone as much as we love her.