Miracle’s Story

I have PCOS and endometriosis, and was told I would need medical help to even have a chance of having a baby. By 29, I was slowly accepting the fact that I might never be a mom. I even remember the day I told one of my close friends I had cried all night because I was approaching 30 with no children and was trying to come to terms with it. And two months later, I was pregnant and didn’t even know it. 

I took a pregnancy test nearly two months after that because I cried about putting my shoes on the wrong feet. My husband was like, “I know you told me you don’t think you can have kids, but you never act like you’ve been acting lately, so take a test.” It lit up like a Christmas tree! We found out soon that it was a boy, and I really enjoyed being pregnant.

We decided on the name Draven Xavier because I had chosen that name as a teenager for my first son, named after The Crow main character Eric Draven and Professor Xavier from X-Men (I’m a nerd). He was born on March 23rd, 2017. We both had some complications at birth because he was actually way over his due date and had IUGR and other issues, but after five days, we went home! He was such a sweet, happy baby. Slept through the night and only cried when his stomach was acting up. 

He died on June 14, 2017 at 2 months and 22 days old, very unexpectedly. I couldn’t imagine why I had to wait so long to have a baby, just to have him taken away so quickly. Somehow I never got angry with God, and I only grew closer to Him. But my husband and I were just hurting too much with his death and other added trauma, and we both started having suicidal thoughts. 

Then six weeks after we lost him, I felt weird and couldn’t stay awake through the day and I just felt pregnant so I took a test and it was negative but I just felt it in my heart, and six days later, another test showed a very faint positive that kept getting darker as more days passed. God gave me a reason to keep going! I wasn’t able to enjoy that pregnancy very much because I was terrified of losing her, knowing there was no safe zone after experiencing infant loss. But her heart kept beating and she kept growing. 

A week before my 31st birthday, I went to a dermatologist because I had a big mole on my right clavicle that had grown large and dark and itched badly. I had my first wide local excision surgery to remove it, and it was stage 2A melanoma. The first surgery didn’t get it all, so I had a second that did, and also had to have a PET scan and a sentinel lymph node removal from my arm pit to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread to other areas of my body, especially while  pregnant because pregnancy hormones almost always make cancer spread like wildfire. 

I had three black lymph nodes removed that my surgeon was terrified would come back as cancerous, but the pathology report said they were black from tattoo ink! He cried with us as he told us the news that my cancer had somehow not spread, and even my oncologist said he never got to give good news like he was giving to me that I was declared “no evidence of disease” and just needed skin checks every three months and a PET scan yearly to make sure it stayed gone or we could keep finding it early if it didn’t.

Nobody could explain why my cancer didn’t spread further faster. By all known medical science, it should have. So God gave me my little girl to not only save me from myself and possible suicide, but also from cancer because I wouldn’t have had the health insurance to even get it checked out if I hadn’t been pregnant again.

Now Irys Ember-Rose is 2, going on 3. She was born April 9, 2018, one year and 17 days after her big brother. They looked almost exactly alike. And I am now also back in college, finishing up a triple cognate of degrees in Christian counseling, biblical and theological studies, and apologetics, and then getting my masters in professional healthcare chaplaincy. My hope is to work in pediatric hospice with parents who have lost or will lose their child so I can share my hope, God’s love, and my son with them.

If you would like more information or would like to participate in Project Finding Your Rainbow, you can read more here.