Submitted by Mike (Rafe’s dad)
As I write this, it’s been just over a month since my wife and I lost Rafe at 38 weeks and 4 days along. The suddenness was…shocking. One day he was there, kicking along like usual, with us preparing for my wife’s inducement the next week, and two days later he was gone.
Now, a month later, the only words I can use to describe finding out are “it was like walking down the street on a beautiful cool day and being sucker punched by Mike Tyson.”
Rafe wasn’t a surprise baby for us. He was planned and wanted. We’d tried for a few months to conceive naturally but when my wife’s genetic test came back positive for the gene responsible for causing her mom to be four-time cancer survivor, we decided to do what we thought was the responsible thing: IVF with genetic testing of the embryos prior to implantation.
To make a long story short, when all was said and done, we produced three perfect embryos, and Rafe’s was the first to be implanted.
He was implanted the day after my birthday, and when, ten days later, my wife’s pregnancy test came back positive, our excitement couldn’t be contained. We told our parents and our closest friends, and we began to prepare to be parents.
A few weeks after that, in the middle of the night, we found out one of our closest friends was pregnant too, and that she would be due just a week ahead of us. Exciting times, to say the least, and as painful as it is to remember now, being shaken awake by my wife because our friend had, at 3 AM, decided she was hungry and in the mean time, to text her and tell her she was pregnant, will be a highlight of my life.
We named our son relatively quickly. My wife let me come up with it and I chose to honor her late brother by naming our son Raphael, which started with the same letter. We joked I’d named him after a ninja turtle.
I was so excited, damn it. I wanted, and still, despite everything that was to happen, want to be a dad. I wanted to share my love of sports and history and movies with my son. I saw us sitting together, cheering for our hometown hockey team or introducing him to Star Wars and watching his face light up when he saw Luke’s lightsaber and made the connection that the thing lying on the windowsill looked just like it. I couldn’t wait for him to be here.
Because he was an IVF baby, my wife’s OB suggested we start seeing an MFM specialist. That was, he said, protocol for IVF patients, and so we said OK. My wife would see he once a month for ultrasounds, and for 38 weeks and two days, it was a textbook pregnancy. He kicked and danced to music and blew kisses. His heartbeat was perfect, and his growth, while somewhat slow because we aren’t tall people, was still normal.
And that’s what gets me: according to the MFM, everything was normal. But if everything was normal, how did my son die?
Because at 38 and 2 days, my wife went to the MFM for a checkup pre inducement, and we had a healthy baby boy. The MFM noticed something (and I can’t talk about this for obvious reasons) and told us to come back two days later as a precaution.
Well, two days later, Rafe was dead, and there’s no concrete answer as to why.
We walked into that doctor’s office expecting to be told we’d need to deliver that day. Instead, the doctor wasn’t even there. Get this: she was on her way to take her kid to a Taylor Swift concert instead of being in her office when a patient she’d asked to come in as a precaution did so. I don’t know about you guys, because I’m not a doctor. But if I’ve got a meeting where I’m responsible for possibly making a decision (and I have a lot of those in my line of work), you better believe I’m in that meeting. That’s without me being responsible for a mother and her baby. So how a doctor who IS responsible for that could justify taking the day to go to a concert is beyond me. I can’t forgive that sort of callousness and overconfidence.
The sonogram tech saw it first. She told us nothing, just to wait for the doctor, who must have been called. The doctor got to the office forty minutes later to tell us the news. My wife screamed, and cried and asked the doc to check again, which she did and confirmed no heartbeat.
And so, we got sent to the hospital, where we were met by my wife’s regular OB. He had, just that day, submitted the paperwork to schedule my wife’s inducement and was just as shocked. A doctor who has been in practice for thirty years told us he hadn’t seen anything like this in decades. There was no cord issue, no placental abruption, nothing. Just there one moment, gone the next.
I’m the only one who saw him. My wife was put under because asking her to push when there was no reward at the end was pointless, and the docs did a c-section. Rafe came out silent, looking like a mix between my wife and I. He was beautiful, but I didn’t want to hold him. Instead, I held my wife and made the call to make sure she didn’t see him afterwards. I focused on her, because as much as I loved my son, I understood I wouldn’t make it through this without my wife. So, I silently said kaddish for him and held my wife before I was escorted out.
The last month has been…a blur? Yeah, that’s probably the best word to describe it. We had to return all the gifts, the stroller and his bedroom set. We put some things in storage for the next baby and have watched our dog occupy what should have been the nursery. It’s like she knows there should be more in there, and doesn’t understand why there isn’t.
But thought of having another child have been the hardest. Rafe was our first pregnancy, and I don’t know how I’ll handle the next one. The best information we have was that it may have been a sudden infarction in the vessels of the umbilical cord. But we don’t know for sure, and that’s part of what scares me. It’s like a stroke, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to predict it happening again. Beyond that, I’m absolutely terrified of being the kind of dad who over-parents because I can’t handle losing another one. I was so excited. And now, I’m terrified to be that excited again.
Mike