Today I’m going to get a little more personal than usual here on Blue Shotgun. The topic of the day is pregnancy & infant loss.

If you follow my personal “personal” blog, Never Picture Perfect (which I’ve not updated lately, but will be updating soon), you probably already know at least part of my story when it comes to pregnancy and infant loss. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my story, I’ll quickly recap it.

On April 4th, 2008 my wife and I lost our third son (and fourth child), Felix David Groce, stillborn at 24 weeks, cause unknown, but a cord accident is suspected.

On October 19th, 2009 (last Monday), my wife and I lost our fourth son (and fifth child), Gabriel Elliott Groce, due to a very rare birth defect called Limb-Body Wall Complex. Gabe was delivered via a scheduled Cesarean section at 37 weeks and lived for 32 minutes before slipping away in my arms.

While I’m not going to go into the personal items here on Blue Shotgun (that’ll show up over on Never Picture Perfect at some point), I wanted to address the topic of pregnancy & infant loss, which seems to be highly ignored, at least here in the United States.

Ask anyone and there’s probably a good chance that they know of someone who has lost a young child (not necessarily an infant), be it via a miscarriage, stillbirth, SIDS, birth defect, accident or some other cause. But very few people I know ever seem to talk about this. Being drafted into this particular group, I can certainly understand not wanting to talk about it on a personal level, but you’d think someone somewhere would be talking about it in a Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness manner just to let the general population understand that even in this day-and-age of “modern medicine”, this happens every single day.

Going into parenthood I knew the statistics of 25% or so of all pregnancies naturally ending in some manner, but the way I read it was that the majority of that took place often before you even knew you were pregnant or shortly thereafter in the first few months.  As time goes on in the pregnancy your chances of loss become much lower and after delivery you’re thought to be “out of the woods” (which is not always the case).

While I do not want to paint a gloomy picture and discourage anyone from having children (the likelihood that you’ll have a healthy, uneventful pregnancy is much greater than otherwise and I can’t put into words how joyous that day is when you have your newborn in your arms), I do think it would be a good idea to educate people on the various possibilities out there.  While having that information beforehand would not have changed my mind about having children one bit, that knowledge certainly would have helped to prepare me for what has since came to pass.  During the loss of Felix my wife & I felt like we were hit by a speeding train.  While the loss of Gabe doesn’t hurt any less, we both feel that we were much better prepared this time around.

With that said, it is our hope to help others work through this difficult time through our own experiences as well as the experiences of others.  My wife had an excellent idea for an online resource following the loss of Felix last year and in the coming months we will begin to roll that out.  If you would like to know when that is online and/or have your own stories that you’d like to share, please contact us.

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