Aiden James Mares

God's gracious gift Aiden James Mares passed away on Thursday November 4th, 2010, and was born into heaven on Friday November 5th, 2010. He weighed just under 2lbs and was almost 14in long.

Thursday was an odd day from the very beginning. I woke up at 8:30 in the morning with a huge wet spot on my shirt. First i felt between my legs because I was convinced that my water had broken and I had been laying in it, but when I realized I was completely dry I started smelling my shirt and checking the bed convinced that one of the cats had peed on me. After searching the entire bed and finding that I was the only thing that was wet, I called the doctor groggy and panicked. After talking to the doctor for about two minutes she asked if I had checked my bra to see if I had started leaking. I peaked inside my bra and sure enough there were stains from my breasts leaking colostrum. The doctor informed me that a lot of mothers will start to leak towards the end of their pregnancy and that it was completely normal and nothing to be worried about. She told me to get some nursing pads to prevent embarrassing moments and not to worry.  At the start of the day I had plans of going and taking the accuplacer test for school and getting ready to register for classes, but after waking up to lactation I realized today was a different day and decided to stay home. Aiden's schedule had changed slightly, he was becoming more active later in the day and during the beginning and middle parts of the day he was mostly stretching and re-adjusting himself. I spent the day just enjoying his company and talking to my boy while resting on the couch. We had an appointment at the Perinatal Resource Center in the hospital at 4pm, I remember leaving the house and thinking that I needed to make sure the cat's had food and water, and thought about grabbing my hospital bag, I wasn't sure why but decided to ignore those instincts. Walking into the hospital Shawn said hello to Aiden and he stretched real big and re-adjusted himself, I said hello baby boy and we both told him that we loved him. After we had signed in at the doctors office we sat down in the waiting room and he kicked hard twice low in my belly, Shawn and I told him we loved him. The moment the ultrasound hit my belly and we saw Aiden on the monitor I knew something wasn't right. Aiden is always moving even when he's sleeping he's always moving, but he wasn't moving. When the nurse looked for his heart beat she couldn't find it, she looked to see if it was just the way he was sitting and checked for blood flow. You could see the blood flowing through the umbilical cord towards him, but nothing flowing out or through him. All I remember thinking was God please no, no please don't take my baby boy from me. After the doctor confirmed that he was gone, they gave us the option of either staying and being induced that night as soon as Dr. Peters could get there, or going home collecting our things and coming back to be induced. Shawn and I decided to stay and be induced that night, we were already there and so heart broken driving was out of the question. Once they had settled the debate of whether we were going to stay and have the delivery now or wait till tomorrow, the doctors informed us that even though Aiden had been head down for the last few weeks he had shifted and was now sitting breach and backwards. They let us know that delivery was probably going to be a little more complicated just because of him being breach and also backwards, they warned that typically because of his size they wouldn't expect me to have any tares or need an episiotomy, but because of those complications it was likely.

Everything was so surreal like there was no way it was actually happening. After calling all of our family and letting them know what had happened, we were moved into room 5706 in the delivery rooms. All the nurses bringing us into the room let us know that they had heard of our son and our story and had been praying for us and him. They told us that they were so encouraged by our strength and faith in God.  At about 6:30 they came in to start my IV, I was informed by our nurse Megan that I had very difficult veins to give IV's apparently they are very small. Megan brought in another nurse that she said was the big guns! She was the IV specialist, and if she couldn’t get it no one could. This nurse made things a little easier, she lightened the mood in the room and made us laugh. She said that when she was learning IV’s she was taught by a scary little Asian women who told her not to think of them as people, their not people their oranges! She told us that it’s very hard to imagine people as oranges because oranges don’t talk, or move. I am apparently a very non-cooperative orange! I’m more of a tangelo because I’m not cooperative and apparently tangelo’s are the rebels in the orange world. Oh and I should never attempt doing drugs because you wouldn’t be able to find a vein to inject them! LOL. Every time she would get close to do the IV I would start laughing and she kept saying I was a very non-cooperative orange. Finally she got to IV in andproclaimed that while she was the big guns and could always get the IV most of her patients looked like road kill afterwards. I was just barely road kill, I was the clean kind only a little blood.


At 8pm after giving me the first dose of medication to help soften and dilate my cervix the doctor let us know that labor was probably going to take a long time, and that our visitor's should probably go home because it would be morning before Aiden came.  My aunt Cindy gave Shawn some Ambien to help him sleep since the hospital would only give me medications, and everyone said goodbye until the morning.

It was the longest night of my life, they offered to give me something to sleep but I was afraid that I would be groggy when Aiden came, so I just attempted to sleep on my own, but I had so many things going through my mind it was hopeless. It didn't help that every half hour the nurse would come in to check to see if my labor had progressed any. At about 12:30am the contractions were starting to bother my back and I requested the epidural, it took an hour of IV fluids before they could give me the epidural. Shawn and I had abandoned hope of sleeping and decided to turn on a movie to take our minds off of everything that was going on.  Shortly after the epidural was started they started petosen in my IV because my labor was still not progressing, I still wasn‘t dilated at all.  At 4:40am Dr. Peters and Megan came in and broke my water.  Because of Aiden’s condition I had a lot of excess amniotic fluid, it sounded like someone turned on the faucet and left it on full blast for about 15 minutes. Megan our nurse was surprised and had to change the pad and towels underneath me multiple times because there was so much. I remember looking at my belly once it was done, I went from looking 9 month’s pregnant to looking maybe 20 weeks within 15 minutes.  Around 6am the nurse brought the anesthesiologist back to give me another dose of anesthesia because I was starting to feel things again, they also increased my petosen because labor was still not progressing or dilating. Once I was numb I fell fast asleep until 7:30am when Dr. Peters came in to let us know that she was going off shift and a doctor for the Perinatologist would be taking over. Before leaving she checked me one more time and let us know that it was actually time to start pushing. Dr. Peter's made arrangements and stayed the remainder of our delivery. At 8am we started pushing and Aiden came at 8:30am.

Aiden was so much smaller then Shawn or I had expected, but he was perfect in every single way. He was so very fragile, everything about him. He didn’t look like what a normal baby would, his skin was fragile and pale and bruised from labor. But to Shawn and I he looked amazingly beautiful, perfect in every single way. Shawn and I spent 45 minutes by ourselves holding him and marveling at how amazing he was. When family came in we held Aiden and let everyone come and see the miracle that was our beautiful little boy. Because he was so fragile we didn’t want anyone to hold him other then us because we didn’t want anything to happen to him. The photographer came and they took pictures of him and us and our family, then we made wonderful little memories by creating molds of his foot prints and his little hand.


After a little while our day time nurse Karen came in and removed my epidural from my back and helped me into the bathroom to clean up. She instructed me on how to use the “mommy diapers” and how to take care of myself for the next few weeks because of the tare and having given birth. She also instructed me to wear a tight fitting bra at all times for the next 2 weeks because my milk had come in full blast and that is the only way to get rid of it and not cause infection.

We spent the rest of the day with Aiden on a baby warmer next to the hospital bed as we rested and enjoyed the time we got to spend with our little boy, our precious little angel. We had many visitors, friends, family, co-workers that are practically family.  LOL we never took a nap because every time we’d start to fall asleep we’d get another visitor. Everyone in the labor and delivery department knew that all three of us were very much loved and supported. At 5:30 our night time nurse Megan came back in and asked us if we wanted a basinet for Aiden to sit in instead of the warmer because the warmer was so big and not very loving. After looking at our son we realized that he was starting not to look like himself anymore, that it was maybe time to say goodbye so that we only remembered him the way he was when he was born.  Shawn picked him up and held him close as he said goodbye, then brought him over to me and I said my goodbyes and kissed his head. Megan came in and gently carried him away.  Taking Aiden from our room was almost the most painful thing of the day, even though we knew Aiden was already gone and in heaven, having his physical body there in the room with us made it seem like he wasn’t gone yet, we could cling to him and never let go.


My work came by and surprised the hospital staff, I don’t think they had ever seen someone’s entire office come in to visit! My office let us know that they had set up a list of people who were going to be bringing us dinner for the next week so that once we got home we didn’t have to worry about trying to cook for ourselves and asked if we needed anything, someone to mow the lawn, groceries, milk, anything.  My office is so incredibly compassionate and loving, we are so grateful for them. After the majority of the office had left Debbie and Lori came by and stayed with us talking for a little while, they even went and got us dinner from noodles and company and sat with us while we ate. After they had left we let Megan know that we were tired and ready to go to sleep, she gave me an ambien and to sleep we went.


The next morning was possibly the hardest day of my life. I physically hurt a lot, emotionally I was destroyed, and my baby was gone forever. After spending 2 hours crying as hard as we possibly could we got up and took showers, packed up everything in the room and called the nurse to see if we could go home. The doctor from the Perinatal center came in and checked to make sure I wasn’t bleeding to much wrote me a RX for some percocet and discharged me from the hospital.  He let me know that typically women who have children are in as much physical pain as I was, but because their body is still producing adrenalin to take care of their new child their bodies don’t allow them to recognize the pain.  He also talked to us that if we wanted we could start to try again in about 6 weeks as long as everything below had healed, but that we may want to wait until we were emotionally stable.


We had already made arrangements with the help of my aunt Cindy to have Aiden taken to Aspen Mortuary once his body was released from the hospital, to have him cremated and his ashes returned to us. It was all said and done. The nurses helped us load up a cart with all of our things, put me into a wheel chair and wheeled me down to the emergency entrance of the hospital. Shawn pulled around my car and we loaded everything into it and I got ready to drive myself home. Shawn went and brought his car around and followed me home.


Driving home was so incredibly painful in so many ways, I had always thought that driving home from the hospital would be Shawn and I together with Aiden in the back seat in his car seat, instead it was Shawn and I in different car’s and Aiden wasn’t coming home.  My body also let me know that it wasn’t very happy with the situation, My stomach hurt down below hurt, my breasts hurt because they were full of milk and engorged. I cried the entire way home so hard that sometimes I couldn’t see.


Though all of this is incredibly painful we’ve learned to focus on the good things, Aiden is in heaven with God the father. There is no pain or sorrow or tears in heaven and he’s healthy and taken care of. We were devastated that we never got to spend time with him while he was alive outside of the womb, but God knew that we couldn’t watch our son die or suffer in any way. Aiden only ever knew love, love from his mother and father, and most of all love from and for God. We are so incredibly grateful to have gotten the chance to have Aiden, to have known him even if it was just 9 short months, he changed our lives forever and will always be our sweet baby boy.  When we started to think about how small Aiden was, and his heart defect that made his heart have to work so much harder, everything that he did was such a miracle. He was much smaller then any other babies but he kicked and moved and made himself known as much or more then other babies. He held on as long as he possibly could, even with his heart he never let us know that he was sick (Obviously we knew because of what the doctors had told us, but Aiden never acted any different then you would expect a normal healthy baby to). Aiden’s story has reached people and families that Shawn and I have never met, through our faith, love and devotion to God in dealing with his diagnosis, Aiden has been a light in this dark world and helped show people to God. Aiden has helped to bring glory to God by bringing non-Believers into his arms.


God has blessed us through this experience and we couldn’t be more grateful. Most parents never experience the kind of love and devotion that we have for our son, not that they don’t love their children deeply but they never learn to appreciate every second that they have with them like we did, because they never have to cope with the idea that ultimately at any moment our loved ones could be called back up into heaven without any warning.


We love and miss of precious sweet little angel boy Aiden James more then anything in the world, but are so grateful that he’s safe and happy in Gods arms and that someday we will be there with him.


Love

-Jessie M. - Aiden’s mommy