Friday's Appointment

I wanted to thank everyone for your constant prayers. We had our appointment on Friday and physically I am doing great. The tests confirmed that it was an infection that took our sweet Alexander. This is extremely rare since the amniotic sac is intended to keep out bacteria, but for some reason it did not for me. According to the tests run on Alexander (there are still a few more results still pending) he was a completely healthy baby boy. This brought me both tears of joy and sadness. I find comfort in knowing that he was a healthy, perfect baby boy, in some way it validates even more his short life, but it also cuts even deeper knowing that this rare case of infection took the life of a perfect, innocent child.
To answer a few of those open-ended questions...

1. Could this have been prevented?
No, they do not know how this happens, why it happens, or how to prevent it. It is simply a "fluke" thing that is very rare.

2. Why didn't they catch this?
Due to how rare this is and how quickly it moves there was nothing pointing them to this. My crazy week of traveling, illness, and business explained all my symptoms and Alexander, along with everything else on the monitor looked perfect Tuesday morning.

3. What if i would not have gone into labor?
If they had suspected and tested me for infection there would have been nothing they could have done to stop or post pone labor. If they would have discovered the infection before labor set in they would have had to put me into labor.

4. Future children?
As far as they can tell it is highly unlikely that this will affect my ability to conceive or carry a perfectly healthy baby. For preventive reasons i will have some blood work done and be sent to a high risk doctor in a few weeks. The dr. basically just wants to get a second opinion on the situation to ensure that they would not do anything differently so whenever we are ready to have another baby we will be prepared.

Overall it was a very bittersweet appointment. It was good in knowing that we left there with the knowledge of what it was, but sad because we don't know why. Good knowing that we still have a positive future to look forward to, but heartbreaking to know that we will always be missing one perfectly healthy baby boy. We left there with a good sense of closure for the situation, and we praise God for that. Now we can focus on healing our hearts and our sweet J.David!