I sometimes come across some pretty amazing situations in my job and thought I’d share this one with you.  I recently got a letter from a woman I counseled four years ago during the events of her unfortunate pregnancy (abnormal).  She had an induction after which she refused to look at the baby, hold it or even acknowledge it.  (We recommend this, encourage it even — to hold and say good-bye to the baby if patients terminate by induction –however traumatic).  As standard practice, the hospital makes a “memory packet” for the family (pictures of the dead baby, hospital tags and footprints).  She didn’t want any of it, and left them for the hospital to dispose of upon her discharge.   I picked up the packet for safe keeping, thinking that she might want them eventually.   I didn’t think it would take four years.

So I get a phone call from an OB asking if I perhaps had any pictures of this woman’s baby.  This woman had already moved back to England, had two other children  and after a couple years, sent a very compelling letter to her former doctor here.  She had sent for all her old medical records from her first pregnancy and until she read through them, never even knew the sex of that baby!  She described feeling an intense loss and overwhelming feelings of regret for not having even looked at her baby; these thoughts had obviously haunted her through the years.  She wrote, “it is something I will regret for the rest of my life,” and about “needing something, a picture, something of the baby…that it would [kill] her to know that something was available and she couldn’t have it.”  The OB department scrambled as they were all very touched by this desperate letter.  It was still in her genetic chart in our department, tucked away, so I sent her the contents of her memory packet.  Mind you, the pictures are really quite disturbing, but hopefully they will give her peace.

So strange — life and human nature and all the twists and turns.  Made me wonder how much people are carrying around with them, you know?