It was July of 2013 and my pregnancy was going along great as it should be. I was 12 weeks along. We hadn't told anybody about the baby yet, except family. We were planning on telling the world after my doctor appointment I had in a few days.
That morning the boys and I were on our way to meet a friend at the park for lunch. We were traveling on Mountain View Corridor going about 50 mph and were getting ready to go through an intersection. I saw a truck coming at me out of the corner of my eye, but I assumed he would stop since my light was green. He didn't stop. He hit me right in my door spinning our van into oncoming traffic. The boys were screaming and hysterical. After our van came to a stop I tried my hardest to stay calm even though I was covered in glass and blood. I carefully turned around and looked in the back seat at my boys praying they weren't hurt. They looked to be fine. Their necks were hurt from the seat belts, but other than that they seemed to be in good shape..just very very scared. I told them everything was going to be okay and a car pulled up. They asked if everyone was alright and who was in the car so they could tell the paramedics. I told them it was just the boys and me, and then started to cry when I said the words "And I'm pregnant".
I was 12 weeks along when I got in the accident and even though I was told that if I were to get into an accident, that was a good time in pregnancy to do it. But all I could think about was how I had lost our last baby at 13 weeks and was so excited for this one and didn't want to bare it if I had lost this one too. The boys were able to come out of the car pretty quickly and I had called a good friend and Brady's parents and they were there at the scene with the boys until Brady could get there from work in Salt Lake. It took them 30 minutes to get me out of the car with the jaws of life. I hated being trapped in there, but kept praying "Please Heavenly Father, keep all my babies safe" I felt a calming sense that Carson and Ryder would be fine, but I wasn't sure about the baby and didn't know what all was going on with me yet.
Long story short, after literally about 50 x rays of my legs, back, arms, shoulders etc. they found that I didn't have any broken bones! They later concluded that i had a lot of damage to my legs and lower back, but after lots of physical therapy and healing i would be okay. And they looked at the baby and his heart was beating great and he was just fine! We were so glad. I was later able to go home. After I got home though, I realized it was excruciating to walk and I couldn't bare any weight on my legs. It was like that for a few weeks - I had to have help with everything.
Fast forwarding again, at one of my doctor appointments a few weeks later my nurse was talking to me about blood clots and said that it sounded like I might have one in my leg. so we went to another doctor's office to get it checked out. Sure enough I had DVTs or clots in my calves. I found out that I had to give myself injections of blood thinners twice a day for the rest of my pregnancy and probably after. I was so upset.. but we dealt with it. I was still unable to walk or bare any weight at that point. Then a few days later I started having some pain in my chest. I had another doctor appointment and I told my doctor about it, but he said that he thought I just had pulled a ligament from the accident.
That night I woke up in the middle of the night with an intense pain in my chest and felt like I couldn't catch my breath. I took some pain killers and tried to go back to sleep, but the feeling of not being able to breathe got stronger. I woke Brady up and told him I was in a lot of pain and couldn't breathe. he thought the same thing as I did, that it was just another affect from the accident. Well my breathing quickly got shorter and shorter and I began to panic. I couldn't speak but did the best I could to tell Brady I needed to go to the hospital. he said okay, let me call my parents to come stay with the boys and I will take you - and then I started to get pale and really couldn't breathe, so he called 911 and an ambulance came and took my oxygen and found that it was really low. so they put me on oxygen and in a stretcher and wheeled me off to their ambulance and we were off to the hospital.
At the hospital I had more x rays and a cat scan and they found that I had a pulmonary embolism or clots in my lung and my lung was in bad shape and was deteriorating. If I had waited any longer, I could have stopped breathing and the clot could have been fatal. My doctor warned me that PE's are the number one killer of pregnant women. I had to be hospitalized for 4 days and put on lots of pain medications.
So you see, Cruz is our miracle baby because he survived all the x rays and scans I had to have, all the pain killers I was on for a long period of time, all the testing I had to have done. We both survived the car crash and the PE in my lung, which could of easily been the other way around. I wasn't expected to walk again until about a year after the accident, but I over came that and was walking again a few months after being hospitalized. All 4 of my boys were my inspiration. We are so grateful for our 3 boys and so happy that Cruz fought to be here with us.
