Day 30: Do a gratitude meditation. Try to keep perspective, positivity & love at your forefront

My friend Sonali is a very grounded human, I feel like she can always see things from a different perspective besides her own. I know she will never agree to this, but Sona is beyond selfless, she seriously always tries to go the extra mile for others, especially for her family. I’m a bit late posting this because she sent me a voice note of her story (which I loved!) and that meant listening to her message many times so I could really listen, transcribe everything and pause quite a few times to cry with her voice. Sonali is braver than she would ever admit and she has kept me from some of my worst thoughts by showing up in her full awesome way even if it's just a word in a text message. This is Rahul’s story, told by his mom: 

“My thoughts around this are all pretty jumbled. My pregnancy with Rahul overall was very very happy. I felt incredibly blessed to get pregnant so easily so quickly. I felt like my body knew exactly what to do. I had really bad morning sickness and everything at the beginning but I thought it was my body doing what it had to do. I just had this overall feeling of bliss and immense gratitude, feeling blessed and just so lucky. I always had this Intuitive sense that the first pregnancy would be very easy,  I didn't know what future pregnancies would hold but the first time it would be really straightforward and that’s exactly how it happened. The scans were all fine, and then after the 20 week scan at one point I felt reduced movement and I went in, and it was fine. They always put it down to the placenta being posterior, I think I went a couple more times but whenever they hooked me up and scanned me everything was fine. 

Everything was good and suddenly I got big very fast, and then I remember I was on the tube on my way home from work and I must’ve been nearly 38 weeks and I’ve been having lower back pain, but this time it was unbearable. I remember thinking I had to make it to the hospital to check and was convinced it was a kidney infection or something like that. I got there and it was obvious that I was in a lot of pain, I couldn’t keep the tears back and there was something wrong. They assessed me and checked on Rahul and everything seemed fine. I had a lot of amniotic fluid, and now I know they probably should’ve told me to be in bed rest, because the amount I had could’ve started labour at any point. They kept me overnight because the back pain was so bad and they would do a scan in the morning of my kidneys or whatever just to check everything.

In the morning, when the consultant came to do the rounds, I was in all 4 because of the pain in my back was so bad. Minutes later a porter came up with a wheelchair and said that they wanted to do a scan on the baby. I was so confused as I had gotten one the day before and this was supposed to be to check my back!? 

So I went down and the consultant was there, and that’s when it all started to unravel. The consultant called in her boss, I called Harry and they said we think the baby has a diaphragmatic hernia which means that there’s a good chance the baby’s lungs haven’t developed properly and there is a 30% survival rate; but we need to see once the baby arrives. Obviously everything came crashing down, I couldn’t understand or believe that at 38 weeks pregnant this was being told to us. Despite the induction starting on Tuesday, nothing had happened by Friday, so they said we are going to break your waters and we’re going to try and progres this now. 

All throughout I was like, the 30% chance we’ve been given, I was thinking it’s going to be fine, it’s going to be fine, there is no way this baby is leaving me and I’m going to take the 30%. 

In the end, around midnight they told us, look, we are going to have to do an emergency C-section. The room was filled with neonatal doctors waiting to intercept Rahul, and obviously the team doing the C-section on me. They told us that if he made it out of the room he had a chance, and so all of the will and the force we had we were putting into the universe that he made it out of that room and that is all I was watching.

When he came out he was perfect, he was just ahh… a head full of curly dark hair with the most gorgeous limbs, he looked like milk. He was just perfect. I could see that the NICU doctors were really working hard on him which was terrifying, but at that point the concentration was so strong that he made it out of the room. The doctors were so kind and they stopped his cot by me as they reorganised so I could have a little look at him. Then Harry followed Rahul into the NICU unit.

As the doctors were coming out, the consultants told me: he doesn’t have a diaphragmatic hernia but he is very poorly and we don’t know what’s wrong with him. The next 24 hours are going to be critical, and the next 12 days ensued. And some of the conversations we had to have and decisions we needed to make were beyond my capacity and intellect and of realms of everything I’ve ever had to do.

And he was just so perfect, he was too big for the NICU cot beds. Eventually on the 12th day he was just too tired and he had been revived one too many times. And so on that twelfth day I held him for the first time so he could die in my arms… which is… I can’t believe I survived that to be honest. It just is the most hideous thing to do that the first time I held him was so he could die. And six years later we haven’t stopped thinking what he’d be like, if we ever did right by him, if we let him suffer too much. I don’t know what to say other than it feels like a freight train has crashed into you and somehow the world just keeps on turning. You feel like you won’t survive the sadness and the rest of your life you genuinely don’t want to.

I had the most blissful happy pregnancy and the most perfect little boy and I did the most unimaginable things that a mother would ever have to do, I still can’t believe we lived through that. They say there are all the stages of grief but I’m still stuck at the stage that is about him and his loss. Even though perhaps, maybe he’s somewhere much more beautiful than where we are and having a much better life than I could’ve given him; but I just can’t be certain of any of that and anyway I’m rambling now. I guess the reason I talk about it being a gratitude meditation is because he is my biggest blessing and he is perfect and I am forever grateful for him.”