Elisha
Mom to Baby Angel Cortez
November 3, 2006
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
I am the face. I am 1 in 4. At 17 years of age, my world was turned upside down; I found out I was pregnant. At such a young age I was scared but still excited that I was going to be a mom.
Nothing could have prepared me for what was to come. When I was 20 weeks pregnant I went for my first ultrasound ever. I found out I was having a boy and was over the moon ecstatic. The next day I received a call from my doctor asking me to come in as soon as possible. Once there, my doctor informed me that the ultrasound had shown some defects and he wanted to send me to a more advanced hospital in a different city. A few weeks later I went to do the testing at the more advanced hospital. That was the day I was informed that my baby wasn’t going to live and if he did live, he wasn’t going to live long.
I was scheduled to come back and have amniotic fluid taken out to rule out chromosome defects. That was traumatic on its own. At 31 weeks pregnant, I didn’t feel my son move at all one day. I called my doctor and he told me to go to the hospital immediately. Once in triage, they couldn’t find my son’s heart beat. They scheduled me to go down for an ultrasound but I knew God had taken my son back to heaven. I went down to the ultrasound room and stared at the screen, a still heart on the screen. I was induced to deliver my son stillborn that night. On November 3rd, 2006 my baby boy Angel Cortez came into this world silent, but beautiful. Still loved, still missed, still remembered. Stillborn but Still Born.
Elisha writes at www.elishahope.com and can be emailed at itselishahope@gmail.com.