A woman was getting her final ultrasound before her baby’s birth. What happened during that appointment changed her life forever.
Ashleigh Rousseaux was pregnant with her second child — a baby boy she named Dominic — in 2014.
During the last ultrasound appointment, when she was 39 weeks pregnant, Rousseaux learned something had gone terribly wrong: her baby had no heartbeat, and the room went silent.
“I don’t even remember the doctor saying the words,” Rousseaux recalled to Mamamia. “I knew immediately what had happened.”
The woman told the outlet that while doctors had previously told her that her unborn child had a heart defect, her medical team had been cautiously optimistic.
Rousseaux said she was in no way prepared for how her life changed in that moment. “I remember going out to the front desk and trying to pay, and [the staff] shooing me out the front door,” she recalled of the moments directly after the heartbreaking scan. “I was just on autopilot, behaving like I had to keep it all together.”
After stepping outside, Rousseaux immediately called her husband.
“The worst moment of my life was making that phone call and telling my husband that his baby had died. It was his first day at a new job. It could not possibly have been more horrendous timing,” she told Mamamia.
Rousseaux was then immediately sent to a hospital across the street, where technicians confirmed Dominic’s death.
“It was a really odd thing to be sitting in both of those spaces at once, like the awe and wonder of becoming a new parent to a new baby, but also nothing was how it was supposed to be anymore,” she said.
Rousseaux gave birth to Dominic at 3:49 a.m. local time the following morning. His funeral was held one week later, on what would have been his due date.
Rousseaux told Mamamia that even though Dominic was gone, she still had the overwhelming urge to take care of him.
Recalling how she fixed a torn onesie she had purchased for her baby before he died, Rousseaux explained, “I just felt this overwhelming need to mend it for him.”
“Not in choosing a perfect outfit, not finding something better or prettier or going to buy him something. I remember the day before the funeral getting out my sewing kit and really slowly taking my time to hand stitch this onesie back together. It felt like everything at the time,” she added. “I had this sense all of my parenting opportunities had gone away — all of those milestones had disappeared, and it became about what I can do right then.”
Rousseaux now works at Red Noses, a nonprofit that supports families through child loss and is dedicated to helping prevent sudden infant death.
She told Mamamia that she and her husband have since made the conscious effort to keep Dominic’s memory alive, as they openly speak about him to their other children, as well as to new people in their lives.
“My kids love talking about their brother and aren’t used to judgment or awkwardness when they do so,” Rousseaux said. “Everyone around us knows and loves our whole family and accepts and embraces that we speak about Dominic openly.”
Rousseaux added that she knows how isolating child loss can feel to families, so she hopes speaking about the subject will make it less taboo, especially for the surviving siblings.
“People have the misconceptions that grief is linear. It’s really not — it comes in waves. That’s how it is generally for adults, but for a child, you also have development happening at the same time,” she explained.
“It can be that a child is quite unfazed by the death of a sibling when they are little. But as they get older, they start to understand how life would be different with their sibling here,” Rousseaux continued.
“Our kids have found that other kids meet the topic with curiosity. If [other kids are] mean about it, they just haven’t been taught yet how to be kind to families like ours. Everyone can learn to do better,” added the mom.
The post During a Routine Final Ultrasound, One Expectant Mother Faced an Unexpected Moment first appeared on Voxtrend News.