I Guess I Just Needed a Thermometer...

When something awful happens, I believe that it is only human nature to want to know "why". We try to come up with every single scenario that we can think of to explain the "why". Sometimes it's easier then other times. Sometimes the "why" is glaringly obvious. Sometimes the "why" is much more difficult to come up with. Sometimes we just come up with a random answer to make ourselves feel better. My answer that I have come up with for the "why" is that I must have just needed a thermometer for some reason. But let me start back a couple days ago...

Last week, probably around Wednesday, I started to not feel good. My nose was stuffy and I had a slight cough developing. At the time, thinking I was almost 10 weeks pregnant, I didn't want to take any medicine. I was willing to do whatever I needed for this child and if that meant going through a box of Kleenex every hour just from blowing my nose so I could function as a breathing human, then that was what I was going to do. Thursday it got a little bit worse and the cough picked up more. Friday was the same. At this point I was starting to get concerned. As most of you might remember, I had pneumonia pretty bad back in January and ended up in the hospital for 2 nights. I knew that with having just had pneumonia, my chances of getting it again were highly increased. This scared me. For myself and for my child. I didn't want to get that sick.

Now I must take the story back just a little bit further at this point real quick. For years, my mother and sister have begged me to buy a thermometer. Every time I was sick, they would ask, "What is your temperature?" To which my reply would always be somewhere along the lines of, "I don't know, I don't have a thermometer. But I know I have a fever." It didn't really matter to me how high the actual number was. I could always tell if I had a fever or not and would take medicine if needed. This drove them insane. They couldn't understand why I just didn't get a thermometer. I'm actually kind of surprised now thinking back, that a thermometer never ended up as a Christmas gift to me....

So anyway, back to last week. I started to research being sick while pregnant just to see what would come up. I kept reading websites about how you needed to be careful if you had a fever because you didn't want to get to warm because it wasn't good for the baby. That same night, while talking to my mother, she asked the dreaded question, "Do you have a fever?" I knew the time had come. I needed to be able to know for sure if I had a fever and how high, not for me, but for the baby. So that next day, I bought a thermometer. The very next day we found out the baby's heart had actually stopped beating 3 weeks earlier. My body didn't realize this and so it kept the pregnancy going. After years and years I finally broke down and got this thermometer for the child that wasn't meant to be.

So we go back to "why"? I have no clue "why"? I probably won't know the actual answer to that for a very long time. I do know though that I loved this baby. I loved it more then I knew was possible. I loved it enough to buy a thermometer.