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Showing posts from August, 2015

Stages of Grief

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People think that grief is only for those that have lost someone, but there are all sorts of situations that can cause an individual to go through the grieving process--divorce, losing a job, breaking-up, and having a child being diagnosed with some form of disorder. You find out you are pregnant, and people ask you what you want--a boy or girl. What do most people say? I don't care, as long as the baby is healthy. The day you find out your child is not healthy-whether it's discovered during the pregnancy, at birth, or when the child is 7 years ago--you are very likely to start going through the five stages of grief. 5 Stages of Grief Stage One: Denial and Isolation All we kept saying was no. Not our baby. Everything is ok. We can explain every single one of these “markers”. There’s no way anything can be wrong with her. The pregnancy was perfect. There are no genetic syndromes in either family. You are wrong. Doctors can make mistakes too. It was easy to ...

Love/Hate Relationship

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Words will never be enough to explain the fear my husband & I faced for the first 2 weeks of our daughter's life. The day after she was born, the neonatal doctor covering at our hospital knew something wasn't right. When he first mentioned the word syndrome, the only thing that came to mind was Down's Syndrome and they already told us she didn't have that. What other syndrome was there? He explained there a so many rare syndromes out there, and that they will do a genetics test to determine what specific syndrome Arianna has.  In the NICU, they threw more than one syndrome at us. It felt as if the Residents had bets going on who was going to diagnose her correctly. It felt like a dream. We kept telling them why we didn't think she had a syndrome. I mean, she's our baby. Those things only happen in movies--this is just a dream isn't it? But there's no coincidences in medicine they say. They told me not to google. But how could I not. There are so...