One of my absolute best friends, Stacy, has an AMAZING sister in-law that I had the wonderful opportunity of meeting and hearing about her journey through pregnancy loss. Mikaila recently welcomed her rainbow baby, Bentley, into the world.
This is her story…
My name is Mikaila Poisel and my husband’s name is Richie Poisel, we are unfortunately the 1;4 who had had to experience the pain of a miscarriage. We decided in 2014 that we wanted to get married and have a baby together; we set a date for March 23rd 2015 for our destination wedding and got the Implanon (birth control in arm) removed to let my body prepare to be able to conceive. We decided to wait until after we were married to actively try, we had no clue how long (or soon) it would happen.
We got married and returned back home after our vacation/honeymoon. After a month and not feeling well for a week or so we got a surprise, we were pregnant with our honeymoon baby! I can’t even describe how shocked and overwhelmingly ecstatic we were. Our first doctor’s appointment went well; we had our blood test and it was in fact positive, everything looked good. We were so happy and couldn’t hold in the excitement, we posted a picture of the positive pregnancy tests on Facebook to announce to our family and friends. Everyone was so happy for us and extremely supportive. Our second appointment we got to hear our little peanut’s heartbeat at 8 weeks in ultrasound and see our little beautiful blob, we fell even more in love and started looking into girl and boy names, we started planning and looking at all the cute baby things in stores and online.
We set our next appointment up for 13 weeks; little did we know we would not be making it to this appointment. On June 4th 2015 I was at work and did not feel right, I had been under a lot of stress from a recent promotion and trying to get set into my role. I was half way through my shift when I felt a gush and ran to the bathroom, my whole world felt as if it was crashing down on me and I knew this was it for me and my peanut.
I called in someone to cover my shift and called my husband hysterically to meet me at the hospital. We made in and the immediately did an ultrasound and our worst fear came true, our babies heart stopped beating and my body was preparing to lose her or him. My doctor gave me an option for a D&C or to let my body do it on its own, they left the room for us to try and wrap our minds around what just happened. I sat in the ultrasound room on the floor crying for what felt like forever. The look of devastation on my husband’s face only made it worse.
I felt like I failed not only me, but my baby and my husband. He tried to be so strong for me but the tears were running down his face while he tried to get me off the floor and hold me. We chose to have a D&C the following morning at 7am, June 5th 2015. I got on Facebook and had to tell everyone that we lost the baby after only announcing a month earlier. It was the longest and darkest night of my life.
We made it to the hospital where my family from Arkansas were waiting to console me before going back (they drove there over night after getting the news). My little angel baby was taken out of me but it felt as if part of my heart was taken with. We had a biopsy done to determine what went wrong and rule out genetic abnormalities, everything looked perfect… and they told us we were going to have a little princess. We named her Makenzie Faith Poisel.
The hospital gave us a certificate of life, a glass angel figurine from the nurses that we became so close with, and white remembrance rose. We placed these all in a shadow box when we returned home to remember our little angel and have it hung up in our living room to keep her with us and our family in any way we can. That little box holds the only physical things I have left of our angel.
We later decided that we were going to try again and prayed for our rainbow baby every day. 7 months later we were blessed with a positive pregnancy test again, I never knew how painful but amazingly uplifting this would be. Every little thing scared me and I was not able to fully enjoy my pregnancy like I would have before experiencing the pain of loss, but my doctors and nurses were beyond amazing and took so many extra precautions with me (progesterone supplements till 16 weeks/shots after 16 weeks, extra folic acid, baby aspirin, and biweekly ultrasounds). I also bought a fetal Doppler for home to check in between visits to ease my anxiety. The pregnancy seemed to drag by but I made it 38 weeks!
I was blessed with the most amazing and perfect little boy named Bentley Logan Poisel 9 lbs. 4 oz, 22 inches long. Our rainbow baby is here. We will never be able to replace or forget our angel baby Makenzie, but going through this pain has opened our eyes to the world even more and made us thankful and grateful for the little things. We believe that god has a plan for us and had a reason for needing to call our little girl home so early. Pregnancy and Infant Loss has unfortunately affected so many mothers and fathers, I hope telling my story will help someone somewhere to keep faith in having a rainbow baby after a loss or raise awareness for this unfortunate tragedy. Thank you for reading my story.
