Hand to Hold's official blog
If you’re like me, the mention of the tiny, three letter word, flu, can cause your palms to sweat, your stomach to sink and in the worst of moments, your knees to buckle. The latter happened to me a few years back when the entire country was in pure panic over the Swine Flu. It [...]
In the book, Before the World Intruded, the reader is taken through a medical trauma author Michele Rosenthal survived when she was thirteen years old. She describes feeling like a zebra, an anomaly, an isolated mystery case that no one seemed to understand or be able to cure. She details the twenty-four years she then [...]
In my state of irrational thinking, I knew it was my fault. There was no other logical explanation. I scolded myself for doing fertility treatments. I told myself I should have accepted that I wasn’t meant to have children. I was convinced this was punishment, through the suffering of my 25-weeker triplets, for my past wrongs. Guilt and self-deprecating thoughts weighed me down like a sodden blanket. And then, tragedy struck again when one of our daughters died suddenly at just 14 months. [Read more]
So I’m driving along and from my backseat hear, “You are my sunshine. My only sunshine. You make me happy. When skies are grey….” sung by the sweet little voice of my daughter Kate, born at 2 lbs., 1 oz. and 25 weeks, 6 days gestation in 2007. I am instantly taken back to the [...]
Over the last couple of years people have asked me time and again if we’d have another. As an only child myself, I’d always promised my unborn child that they would have a sibling. But after everything we’d been though with Bryce, and continue to struggle with, I couldn’t bring myself to commit to that as-of-yet unkept promise. But as serendipity would have it, the decision was made for us and here I sit almost 36 weeks pregnant with Bryce’s little brother. [Read more]
Surrender. Defeat. Failure. These are the words that circulated in my head when I reluctantly agreed to a gastrostomy for my son.My son and his twin sister were born 16 weeks early. Due to a complication of a PDA surgery at only two weeks old, my son was left with a paralyzed vocal cord. After [...]
I like to write lists. Then write them again because I’ve either left the list at home and I’m at work, or it’s in my other jeans pocket, or I wrote it on a receipt and ended up throwing it out thinking it was garbage, or I’ve just completely lost it. Either way, writing things [...]
Motherhood is a journey, and when your child is born early, it is normal to bear emotional scars from the experience. Over the years, I’ve found tremendous comfort in reading the experiences of other preemie mothers. Just learning that I wasn’t alone and that others had similar reactions made it easier for me to heal, to grieve the birth experience I’d wished I had and to release the guilt and shame for the complicated emotions I experienced surrounding my children’s early birth. Enjoy these lessons I learned and excerpts from Preemie: Lessons in Life, Love, and Motherhood by my friend and fellow preemie mama Kasey Mathews. [Read more]
Hand to Hold is a nonprofit 501(c)3 parent support organization and information and resources provided here do not intend to take the place of the relationship between a patient and personal physician.