My Story of Pregnancy Loss and Hope
My husband and I began dating early in high school. Even when we were that young, he talked about how much he wanted to be a dad. I figured that I would like to have kids, but it just felt so far away and too abstract for me to really consider. I could not picture myself as a mother. In 2014, I decided that I was finally ready to start a family. I had finished graduate school, studied abroad, had a strong career, and owned a home. Those seemed to be the difficult tasks, so I figured that getting pregnant would be so simple. And it was. We got pregnant almost immediately, and we proudly announced it to our families. No one told me that staying pregnant could be tricky. We went to our 8-week appointment, and the baby appeared to be measuring behind with a slow heart rate. We were assured that my dates could simply be off, so we returned two weeks later for a follow-up ultrasound. We were informed that the baby had stopped growing, its heart had stopped, and that my pregnancy was “no lon