ourstory

My husband and I are a Christian couple. We were married on October 10, 1998. From the time we became married, we knew we wanted to have more children. We have a 10 year old son, who is biologically mine, and my husband adopted him. We tried for 1 1/2 years to get pregnant with no success. Our church had a night of special prayer for couples wanting to conceive in May of 2000. We went up for prayer, believing God was going to give us a baby. We became pregnant within that next month! I found out on June 28th that I was 3 1/2 weeks pregnant! I enjoyed EVERY moment of being pregnant.

When I was 5 months along, we had our first ultrasound.We found out we were having a BOY! We named him Jesse Curtis Slack (Jesse after David's father in the Bible and because we wanted a "J" name, and Curtis after my husbands grandfather). During the ultrasound, the doctor thought he saw some extra tissue by our baby's neck, but he wasn't sure. The doctor wondered if it was an amniotic band (something I had never heard of until then). He explained an amniotic band to be tissue that breaks away from the sack the baby is in when the two sacks fuse together. He said they are like little cobwebs floating around in the amniotic fluid and could get caught on part of the baby. He said there is no cause for this and it is very rare. He was concerned that one may be caught on the baby's hand. He scheduled us to come in for another ultrasound in one month to see if those were bands and if they have caught on the baby's hand.

At the 2nd ultrasound, I was 6 months pregnant. In the ultrasound I asked, "Did his hand move?"- the doctors were quiet. Finally we heard the words that will forever ring in my ears, "There's no easy way to say this, there's no heartbeat." Our baby was dead? How could this be? I was taken to the hospital and labor was induced. The following day I delivered our son, Jesse. We discovered the cause of his death was one of the amniotic bands had wrapped around his umbilical cord- the part of the umbilical cord bringing him life. And it cut off his lifeline.

We held our baby, he weighed about 1 pound and was 12 1/2 inches long. He was bald and he looked just like his dad. His skin was dark because of the lack of oxygen. But he was perfect in every way to us. I sang to him, rocked him, kissed his little cold nose, and rubbed his cheeks. When it was time to say good-bye, I kissed his forehead one last time and gently took off his little hat to keep.
We know our son is in Heaven with the Lord now, but we do not believe this was God's plan for him to die. The doctor said what happened was a "fluke". He said it was like "getting struck by lightning".

Although we grieve now and long for our baby Jesse, we know the Lord Jesus will present our baby to us one day when we arrive in Heaven.