We were so excited to go to our 20 week ultrasound appointment. Due to covid restrictions they do not allow dad’s in to your appointments really except for the 20 week ultrasound. Plus we knew she would look more like a baby this time around and we were beyond excited to see her! We get in there and immediately we can see her little button nose, hands reaching over her head, her little feet and we were even more in love. I had a slight feeling that something might be wrong because the ultrasound tech kept measuring my cervix over and over again, even stopped to use a vaginal ultrasound to do it which I found to be quite odd so far along during pregnancy but I didn’t think anything of it. We finished up the ultrasound and then I went to my room and my husband was told he had to now exit the building due to covid. Then my doctor walks in and she begins to explain to me that she is concerned because the size of my cervix is really short measuring at 0.7 when it should be at a 4.0 or higher. Which basically meant my cervix was dilating and preparing for labor much earlier than expected. She proceeded to tell me that she made a phone call to a high risk facility about an hour away and said that I have two options. I could either go home with a prescription cream that I use for a week or two and then come back in and see if my cervix stopped thinning or I could go to the high risk facility and be evaluated overnight and have a procedure the next day where they sew in a cerclage onto my cervix to stop it from dilating in an attempt to prolong the pregnancy. All of this sounded like a foreign language to me and I didn’t have my husband there to talk it over with and so I looked at her and said “well what would you suggest? I don’t even understand completely what all of this means!”. Her answer wasn’t the most helpful, she said “I can’t tell you what to do it has to be your decision, but maybe it doesn’t hurt to get evaluated by a high risk team”. I asked for some privacy to call my husband and to figure out what to do. She walked out of the room and for like a good five seconds I just asked God to please guide me on what I need to do because I have no clue. I hated hospitals and the thought of going in and having a procedure done to me sounded terrible, but I felt like God was telling me to go to the hospital. So I ended up calling my husband just to tell him that I needed to go to the hospital tonight and did the best I could to explain what was going on. Looking back on this situation this is one of the first decisions we were faced with that had we decided with the other option it would have caused us to lose the pregnancy. We get to the hospital that evening and the on call resident immediately does a speculum exam, takes some cultures, and tell me that I not only have a yeast infection but that I am 3cm dilated but believes I could be a good candidate for the procedure the next day. She admits me, takes me to my room for the night and tells me that the attending physician who performs the procedure will examine me in the morning right before and will make a final decision in the morning. Meanwhile they start me on antibiotics for the infection and tell me to get some rest for the night. My husband and I prayed, he left to go pick up our kids from our friends house and was told he can pick me up the next day after the procedure and that everything should be pretty routine. What was in store for us the next day is something that I don’t wish on anyone. Every choice we made from the next day forward is the only reason our little girl is here today.

I have always believed in God, I believed in praying before making important decisions but this part of my faith was tested beyond measure this day. I woke up the next morning ready for the cerclage procedure that I was evaluated for the night before. We called a friend of ours to meet up with my husband at the hospital around 12 to get the kids so my husband could come up and sit with me before the procedure. Due to covid restrictions the kids aren’t even allowed inside the hospital unless they are a patient there. So my husband and the kids were waiting out in the car for my friend to show up. They originally told us that I wouldn’t be seen till around 1pm but of course things happen in a hospital and they decided to wheel me to triage pre-op around 10am. They have me in an area with other moms to be, separated by only a curtain. Some mom’s are coming out of c-sections and some from other procedures like the one I was about to get. I end up waiting an hour to go in because they had a medical emergency with another mom so it’s about 11am by the time the attending and his resident make it to my bedside. Because my husband is still in the car downstairs I decide to call him on the phone and have him on my bluetooth headset so that he can hear what’s going on. They begin a speculum exam to take a look at my cervix before they take me back and I hear them whisper a few things to each other and then they both stand up and the attending’s exact words to me are “There’s fluid in the vagina, your water broke and you’re miscarrying and there’s nothing I can do for you”. I break down instantly, uncontrollably crying. I ask what about the baby? and he says to me “we can’t do anything for the baby at 20 weeks, we do not resuscitate that young”. The other nurses hear me crying and run over asking what’s going on, they look just ask confused since this was all supposed to be a routine thing. The resident physician tells them what is going on and the nurses stand on both sides of me rubbing my arms and saying over and over “I’m so sorry”. They even try to break the rules and get the hospital to allow my husband up with the kids one of them saying “she really needs her husband up here right now, she shouldn’t be doing this without him”. The attending does an ultrasound and still sees some fluid around the baby and gives me two options. Here yet again comes another decision that we are faced with that had we made the wrong choice she wouldn’t be here today. He tells me that I can either be given Pitocin to induce the labor and get it over with or I can wait it out. Mind you I am still crying uncontrollably and I am yet again being faced with a decision without my husband right next to me. Meanwhile my husband is in my ear piece still and he says to me “I hear what they said but God is in control, we are not going to give up yet”. I instantly think he’s being so naive refusing to except the reality of our situation. I cry yelling back at him and say “did you not hear what they said??? They said we are miscarrying!”. My husband with complete confidence says “Yes I heard what they said! But we serve a bigger God and until God says it’s over were not giving up”. So I look at the resident physician and I say “were going to wait it out”. They wheel me back to my room where I just sit there silently staring out the window balling my eyes out. A new nurse comes in and just sits beside me holding my hand. She reminds me that they are all there for me and that I am not alone. She offers to get me anything I want she said she didn’t care what it was. I told her “I don’t want anything, I just want to sit here and cry”. She walks out and I literally BEG God for a miracle. I post what is going on on FB and text as many of my friends that I can think of begging them all to please pray for our daughter. At this point I was DESPERATE. I was desperate for God to hear as many prayers as possible. My husband finally comes in and he just holds me and begins praying instantly over Kehlani. He keeps declaring that he knows God has a purpose for Kehlani’s life and this can’t be the end. My husband asks the nurses to speak to the attending physician because he had more questions, he didn’t like the way things were delivered to me, he didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t told to me in a private setting rather than other moms in the room as well, we also didn’t understand why they wouldn’t attempt to save the baby, we also didn’t know what it meant moving forward. We spent the entire evening waiting for the doctors to come talk to us and here it was midnight and no one ever came. So my nurse called the on call physician who originally checked me in the night before. She came in to tell us what to expect. Pretty much answered all of our questions and told us what to expect when she comes, asked us if we would want to see and hold her. Every conversation was focused on getting us to accept the fact that we were losing her. On a whim the on call physician decides to do one more speculum exam to see if I dilated any further. She gets done and looks at me and says “what did the attending tell you?” I explain to her the same situation of him saying my water broke and we were losing her. The doctors looks a little puzzled and she says to me “I don’t think your water broke, the sac looks in tact to me”. She says she will be back she is going to go take a look at his notes and give him a call. She returns with the night shift high risk team and they basically explain to me that they indeed think the original assessment of my water breaking might have been in error. And that instead what they believe is going on is that the bag the baby is in has protruded through the dilated cervix causing it to sweat and the sweat is leaking not my water breaking. They do an ultrasound just to make sure and still there is fluid around the baby. They end up saying we are going to keep an eye on you for a couple of days and see what happens. They walk out and my husband and I cry in disbelief. We can’t believe it, God gave us the miracle we prayed for, more time. I spend the next four days in the hospital and have no changes. My cervix is still 3-4cm dilated and the bag sweating but no new changes. At this point I have made it to 21 weeks. They decide to let me go home on strict bed rest of only getting up to shower, use the bathroom, and medical appointments. We continue to pray asking God to please allow us to get to 22 weeks. We were told that 22 weeks was the earliest gestational age that the neonatologist would attempt to save her life. I went home and did exactly what I was told. Staying in the bed just about 24/7, not getting up unless I absolutely have to. In this stage my husband and I truly understood what it meant when they say every day is a gift. Every day that we could keep her in the womb was a blessing. Every single day counted towards her chances of survival and we knew how critical it was to keep her inside as long as possible. Making the decision to wait it out versus inducing the labor now had us at 21 weeks and counting. We feel blessed that God guided us with the discernment to wait it out.