They literally told me she was going to die. (Part 1)

 It is so odd, writing about the loss of a child, you fear that the words can never fully express the pain and the gravity of the situation. But I don’t mean to just express my pain and loss. I mean to show God’s power and love even in the darkest days.

I come from a culture of silence, where speaking about certain issues is almost taboo. One of the most kept secrets is when a woman loses a child, no one talks about it and it is almost like it never happened. People only speak about it when the woman has another child or they find out that you have lost a child. I fall in the category of the latter. I gave birth to my beautiful daughter on the 2nd of March 2015 and she passed away on the 3rd of March 2015 after 42 weeks pregnancy.

I remember my experience and every time, I marvel at the power of God to give unimaginable peace. I found out on the 22nd of January 2015 that my daughter had a condition called congenital diaphragmatic hernia; an extremely rare condition in which the diaphragm does not fully develop and has a hole. The diaphragm is the organ that separates the chest cavity from the abdomen. When it has a hole, it leaves space for the organs in the abdomen including the stomach, liver and kidneys to go into the chest cavity. This means they take up space meant for the organs in the chest cavity and barely leave room for them to grow.

In my daughter’s case, her heart ended up being pushed to the right and her lungs barely developed. In fact she only had one lung and that was almost undeveloped. The summary of this, they told me, is that once she was born, she won’t be able to breathe on her own due to lack of lungs and the positioning of the heart. The ironic part is the fact that as they spoke I could feel her kicking and turning. This made it very difficult for me to understand what they were saying and they emphasised to me that I was keeping her alive through my placenta. They emphasized that once she was brought into the world, she had less than a 15% chance of survival only achievable with intense medical intervention. She was also a very small baby and so there was a limit to how much her body would be able to take even with intervention.

They literally told me she was going to die.

Now as a Christian, I only knew one thing. I had FAITH. My Faith was that God would perform a miracle that’ll shock them. They only knew medicine but they didn’t know my God. Jesus woke Lazarus up from death after 3 days in the grave. Jesus Christ said that faith of a mustard seed could move mountains and I truly believe that. My faith was completely childlike and I prayed every day that God would perform a miracle for me. I asked God to shame the forces of evil that wanted to hurt my daughter and take her away. I called on my Church family and my husband and I told those closest to us to join us in prayer and I documented the process with videos so I could share my testimony with the world. And my baby girl was so active, she would kick and turn when I prayed and took communion. She strengthened my faith.

TO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT POST.