This post is from the “True Story” collection of posts and contains details about the real and true events of my life. *Trigger warning* Child loss/Still birth

At 8:30 AM on March 20th, we were given our hospital room. Our nurse was young and so nice.

“You’ll be in here until baby is here, and then you’ll move down one floor to the postpartum unit. Does this guy have a name?”

We watched her write “Jackson Daniel Dennis” on the white board on the wall. It had a little picture of a stork carrying a baby.

“This is your belly band. I’m going to get this situated on you, so we can monitor baby’s heart rate during labor using this little disc.”

She wrapped the band around my back and clipped it to itself to secure it in place before turning on the ultrasound machine.

Nothing.

She moved the disc around, asking me, “Does he usually sit more on one side than the other? Maybe he’s shifted.”

“He does flip a lot. Last night he was over here.” I pointed to my left side.

She continued to slide the disc around until she stepped back and stopped.

“Let me just grab a doctor. I’m having trouble getting it in the right spot, so I’m going to let her try.”

She left the room, whispered in the hallway, and came back in with a doctor.

I immediately noticed that the doctor didn’t even attempt to move the band around any more. She sat down right next to me and pulled the ultrasound machine around to the side of my bed. 

“Okay, so… let’s take a look here.”

She moved the screen around.

Reader, I don’t know the exact words she used. I’ve never been more sober in my life, and I couldn’t tell you with any degree of certainty what happened in the next three days.

She pointed. “Here’s the heart” *pause* “I’m so sorry. It isn’t beating. I’m so so sorry.”

I saw the nurse nudge my husband over to my bedside and tell him to hold my hand– the universal sign for “you’re not going to like what you’re about to hear.”

I was so confused. They say denial is the first stage of grief, but from experience, I can say that “denial” might just be a misinformed way of saying “disbelief.” The feeling is so difficult to describe. All I could think was, “How hard can it be to find his heartbeat? This is going to be a funny story when I tell him about the day he was born and how scared they made me.”

“What do you mean? What does that mean?” I asked, still not understanding what she meant.

“The baby no longer has a heartbeat. I’m so so sorry.”

“Then take him out before he dies.” I was starting to breathe really heavily, and I was scared these people weren’t moving fast enough. If his heart really wasn’t beating, they needed to get him out fast, before he was gone.

The nurse asked me, “When was the last time you felt him kicking?”

“A couple hours ago. We did an elective ultrasound yesterday, and then I stayed up last night, and he was kicking until I fell asleep around 6 AM.” I was talking really fast and looking at my husband who was turning white and starting to panic.

I suppose at some point during this exchange, the doctor probably told me the baby was gone. She’s probably required to say it, so there isn’t any confusion, and I probably didn’t hear it over the screaming.

My husband dropped my hand and started dry heaving. I was screaming for my phone.

“Call my mom. Call my mom!  Get me my mom now.” 

Someone handed me my phone, already dialed and ringing for my mom. She must’ve eventually answered, but as soon as I heard her, “Dani? What’s wrong? What’s happening?” I had no words.

I sobbed and screamed into that phone until my husband attempted to give her a clearer answer, also failing to find the words. 

Our nurse took the phone from him and ducked into the corner to talk to my mom and update her while I continued to panic in the background.

My mother says it was the worst sound she’s ever heard.

Shortly after, I was moved, in a wheelchair, to a different, more secluded room down the hall. That hallway felt like the longest hallway a person could ever go down. It felt like I was being wheeled further and further away from the people who knew he was still alive, like this was where they take patients when they aren’t even willing to try to save the baby. This was really just the area where pregnant moms couldn’t hear other new moms’ babies crying. This was the area for moms whose babies were dead.

Thankfully, when things like this happen, they drop the topic of induction entirely and give you as much space as possible. They don’t play the “happy day a new baby is here” music over the intercom. They put a sign on your door.

Around noon, another doctor arrived– it might’ve even been my own OBGYN– to sit with me and ask if I was ready to be induced.

Again, confusion. I didn’t realize I still had to have the baby. I assumed they would offer me a C-section and just take him out. The idea of having to labor and birth my dead son seemed unreal and cruel. Surely, if I had to birth him, then he must be alive. Right?

At the 7 PM shift change, I was passed over to a new nurse, Lena. I’ll never be able to thank her enough.

Lena was older than the other nurses. She seemed empathetic not just because she was a nurse, but because she was a person. They all were that way, but Lena felt like a warm hug. Our whole family bonded with her over our loss,  and because she even reminded me of my own mom. I agreed to be induced.

At 9 PM that night, 12 hours after I was scheduled to be induced, Lena brought me a couple different medications and the process began.

I guess it would be important to note that even by this point in the day, I didn’t believe it was real.

“This isn’t happening to me. This is not real. I don’t understand.” I must’ve said it a dozen times. The screaming and crying came in waves every hour or so. The laughing too. It was the kind of laughter you have after a long day of work, when you come home and your house is flooded. A laugh that says “This has got to be a joke.”

I woke up around 2 AM in the worst pain of my life, mashing on the call button and begging for an epidural.

My own OBGYN was now on-call, and he came in to talk with me. 

“I’m in labor.” I practically growled him, “I want an epidural now. Right now.”

OBGYNs of the world, you should know that in that moment and in my situation, the last thing a person wants to hear is:

“This isn’t what you want to hear, but it isn’t time for an epidural yet. I’ll get something to help with the pain, but this isn’t actually labor yet. You’re only 2 centimeters.”

TWO CENTIMETERS. TWO.

I think I told myself at that moment that if he was the one who delivered my baby, I’d have to make sure to accidentally kick him in the head while pushing.

Lena came back in and gave me the best present I’ve ever received: Stadol. I fell asleep after that, and I think I had a little hope that I’d wake up and realize it was all a dream.

The next day was a nightmare. Hourly waves of crying and begging, grief counselors and nurses, high blood pressure, making phone calls to family members. My mom handled most of the difficult conversations. She texted my best friend and my sister to fill them in. I stayed catatonic for hours.

I asked my mom to gather the troops. I wanted everything baby-related out of our apartment before I got home. Every outfit, every bottle, every diaper needed to be gone before I had to see it. I could not and would not relive this experience again.

My best friend’s boyfriend, now a good friend of my husband, asked his dad to donate a casket for our son. Their family owned a mortuary, and they were able to cover all our funeral expenses and my son’s burial service. All the arrangements were made without me even knowing, for which I am very grateful.

Our grief counselor must have visited us every hour that day. She stayed with me all afternoon, going over paperwork and support groups. They preemptively scheduled my follow up appointments that I would need to monitor how I was healing, and she told me a mental health counselor would be reaching out after we were discharged– to make sure Jarod and I weren’t spiraling or hurting ourselves.

By 10 PM that night, I was still only four centimeters dilated, and my new nurse, Haley, was flipping me around every half hour, trying to get the process moving faster. 

Something she did must have worked, because in the middle of night I woke up in paralyzing pain. I had gone from four centimeters to eight in a matter of hours. I’d had an epidural a few hours prior and was pressing the call button for another, fearful for whichever anesthesiologist was about to walk through that door to my wrath.

Another nurse, not on my service, Hannah, came in to assist. She tried to help me breathe through the labor, but after two hours of screaming and paralyzing contractions, we realized that quite simply, my epidurals, all four of them, hadn’t worked, and I was going to have to labor unmedicated. I loved Hannah, and a year later, I actually tried to plan my second birthing experience around her work schedule, but in that moment, I cussed at her. I gave her the death stares, the swear words, and if my hands had not been balled up in pain, I probably would have flipped off every person in that room too. 

At 4:30 in the morning, I started pushing. My husband nearly passed out, so while nurses rushed him sprite and cookies, I pushed out my son, by myself. My OBGYN arrived just in time, and at 5:55 AM, after 35 hours of labor and over an hour of pushing, my Jackson was born.

There was no sound of crying. No rushing to get him cleaned off and handed back to me. No letting my husband cut the cord.

They took him away, my nurses quietly crying, my mom and husband sobbing over me, and they dressed him in the clothes we’d brought for him.

I held him and cried. He was 7 pounds 6 ounces and looked just like my husband.

They kept him in a cooled bassinet in the room next door, per my request, and I went over to visit him several times until the mortician came to take him away.

We had Jackson baptized a few hours after he was born. I don’t regret that decision, but I wish I’d advocated more for myself at that moment. I wish I’d spent more time with him alone, savored every second.

We let the immediate family come stay in our room to see the baptism, which I’m sure was comforting for them, but I was still in a hospital gown, paralyzed and confused, afraid to say what I wanted to say.

“Everyone leave me alone. I want to die.”

My nurses came to check on me regularly throughout that day, while my mom and mother-in-law bickered and fought in the room next door, which was somehow equal parts annoying and relieving. It kept my nurses entertained and gave me a good reason to kick everyone out of that hospital

By Thursday morning, it was time for us to leave. Hannah had specifically requested to be on my service the night before, which I appreciated, and we had prepared together for what the upcoming few weeks would look like: how to get rid of the breast milk, how to grieve, how to function. 

I didn’t want to leave that hospital. I certainly didn’t want to stay, but I didn’t want to go home. I felt like if I stayed, it couldn’t be real– as long as I didn’t leave, I wouldn’t be going home without a baby.

They wheeled me downstairs, while a wonderful nurse helped my husband scrape the “baby on board” sticker off our back windshield.

The one remaining piece of Jackson that my mom hadn’t been able to hide was still sitting in the backseat, empty.

We rode home with that empty car seat, and when we pulled up at our apartment, I sat in the car for an hour. My husband took our hospital bag inside and hid it in the back of the closet, still full of unused diapers and onesies that wouldn’t be worn– our wooden baby announcement sign wedged inside, blanks left unfilled.

My mom had rented a storage unit nearby and took it all. Apart from the dresser, there was very little sign that my son ever existed. We used the empty room to store our memento box, full with his locks of hair, footprints, baptismal outfit, and stuffed lion.

The next few weeks were awful. I showered multiple times a day to wash the grief off me, and I kept a journal of my thoughts so I wouldn’t ever forget. My husband worked out incessantly. We cried until there was nothing left, and when he went back to work, I found it in me to cry some more. We ate fast food for months, and when my grief turned into plain old depression, I found it hard to even get out of bed, put on clothes, brush my teeth. 

Strangely enough, when our house was done the following month, it was difficult to leave that apartment. I couldn’t really explain why, but I told my husband:

“It feels like his entire existence happened within this apartment. It feels like I’m leaving him behind by leaving.”

And now I see him every day in my daughter, Calliope Jackson Dennis.