Peace of mind...maybe?

After Alexandra died, I remember I would sit here for hours and hours just googling stillbirth causes and anything having to do with grief and support. While I was doing that, I stumbled across this site, The Pregnancy Institute. I remember reading about what this doctor did for pregnant women who had already had a loss and I thought the work was amazing. I also felt so sad because I wondered if I had this for Alexandra, would we have been able to save her? But how were we to know? Months passed and I never really acted on it. For one thing, I didn't know if I would get pregnant again and when I did, my thoughts were, this doctor is in another state, how would that even work? Well, one day I was on Facebook of all things and one of my friends shared a video of how it all works. It was a newsclip of someone who had done this. I immediately took an interest in it and went to the site again and thought, what the hell, I'll e-mail him and see if I hear anything from him. If not, that's okay. Well, I e-mailed Dr. Collins and he e-mailed me right away and said to call him as soon as I could! I was floored. Months of fighting with ob/gyn offices just to talk to someone about another pregnancy, then fighting some more to talk to someone if I was afraid of something and for this doctor to follow up with me right away?! Well, I took it as a good sign.

For those of you who are not familiar with Dr. Collins, he specializes in cord related accidents and stillbirth. He had previously practiced for a number of years and had delivered babies in the past that had cord related accidents. He is now part of The Pregnancy Institute that offers home fetal monitoring for pregnant women who have had a previous stillbirth. To read more about him, go here and check out the videos he has.

As far as we know, Alexandra's death was not related to a cord accident. However, after contacting him he said he was interested in seeing us anyway. I admit to being afraid of this whole thing. Was it safe? Was it the right thing to do? Was traveling okay for me? Would it be worth it in the end? What it came down to was, my husband and I are willing to do anything at all possible to bring this little boy home with us and we would rather do something instead of nothing and regret it later when it was too late. So we flew down to Baton Rouge, LA and met with Dr. Collins. I can honestly say this is the most comfortable I have been up to this point. Just to talk to someone who understands how afraid we are and actually wants to discuss the issue of stillbirth was refreshing. My doctors have been great, thus far, but I can't help but feel that if something were to happen, all they would say was, there's nothing we could have done...like last time. Dr. Collins thinks differently. There is nothing we could have done isn't in his vocabulary and he wants to change that by using this home fetal monitoring system. It's basically a monitor that shows the heartrate and your contractions and you are hooked up to it every night for half an hour. After that, the results are e-mailed directly to him via
e-mail and he interprets them after that. If it shows any significant dips, that's when you are instructed to go to the hospital and not to leave until they do an ultrasound or get that baby out! I feel that many other doctors and associations all feel that his work is unnecessary and that he is not a professional. I can tell this already just by mentioning him to my own doctors. They have no idea who he is and really seem to not care. And that frustrates him to no end. It's just like the issue of stillbirth. Nobody, not even professionals want to ever talk about babies dying and when they do, it's just one of a few hundred instances that are unfortunate in the field and the issue is not discussed. Dr. Collins spoke to us about how often he has gone to conferences and spoken with ob/gyns about cord accidents/stillbirth and not one has this subject in any of their conferences. Why? You would think with how often stillbirth happens (and in this community, we all know it happens more often than people would think), someone would be interested in addressing the issue or at least looking into why these things happen. Hopefully, in the future maybe it will change.

I'm still waiting on one thing before I actually am able to e-mail him my nightly results, but I have been using the monitor since I have returned and it does add some peace of mind for me. I just hope it's all worth it in the end. Please let it be. :-)