josie's story

right after thanksgiving we had the 20wk ultrasound for our baby. we left thinking everything was fine. the next week my doctor called saying they had found a few "issues" with the ultrasound and we needed to see a specialist. basically, they found cysts in her brain and there was a gap between her first 2 toes. seeing these two items together raised a red flag for trisomy 18 & downs syndrome. needless to say, it was a pretty scary time for us as we didn't know what the future held for our baby.

on december 12th, we saw the specialist who preformed a second ultrasound. he confirmed the cysts & toes and scheduled us for an amnio. our risk of trisomy 18 or downs syndrome was around 1%. a week or so later we had our amnio results back - everything looked fine! praise god!

fast forward to last thursday (january 31st). the specialist wanted to do one last ultrasound to make sure the brain cysts had cleared up. basically it was just a routine follow-up. while driving to the appointment i caught a patch of ice and spun my car out into a large curb. no one hit me and it was a pretty low impact crash. i was fine. the accident happened right in front of amway world headquarters. before i knew it, security was there calling me a tow truck and directing me to the nearest lobby for coffee and donuts.

that afternoon i headed back to the doctor so they could just do a quick check to make sure everything was fine. well, i should say i assumed it was going to be a "quick check" as i brought garrett & ryan with me. nope - a 1 hour non-stress test. fun stuff with 2 little boys!!! by the end of the hour, toys had been put in the toliet, pee cups had been pulled out of the garbage and the iud display had been used as a cell phone.

the testing showed that the baby's heartbeat dipping so i was sent to the hospital for the night. i was just supposed to get some fluids and be discharged in the morning. the next morning i was told that the heartrate was still dipping and they couldn't figure out why. the doctors decided to do a c-section.

i was not at all prepared to have my baby born yet. but it was totally god's timing. once they delivered her via c-section they found out that her placenta was very small and the umbilical cord was both skinny & short (only 22 cm...32 cm is considered short). both of these conditions would most likely have prevented her from surviving full term. most likely she would have stopped moving one day and then it would be too late. neither one of these conditions would have been picked up in a routine office visit. thank god for the car accident and the monitoring i received that afternoon!

talk about god's amazing & awesome timing!!

we are still trying to process everything that's happened over the past few days. but one thing we know for sure is that god is so much bigger than we can even imagine. his plan for everything is perfect. we are just along for the ride. we look forward to seeing how he works in our family's life in the weeks, months & years to come :)