Honoring My Angel Babies

This has been a hard year for us. My husband has been laid off twice and we've moved back and forth between two states trying to figure out what to do. Every time we think we are okay again, something else gets thrown at us. The stress of dealing with how we are going to pay our bills and be able to survive has been tremendous. This has led to discussions of dropping our health insurance. I'm not totally comfortable with that idea, but we honestly can't afford it anymore. To top it off, the paper I received today says that they are quadrupling our deductible, lowering what they pay and raising our premium almost two hundred and eighty dollars. We would be paying almost a thousand dollars a month if we kept this policy. Of course the Marketplace website is down, so at the moment I can't even look to see if there are any other plans we could switch to. I seriously doubt I will find a plan that is worth what we would be paying though. It looks like we would be better off taking the penalty at tax time.

The biggest reason I'm nervous about dropping insurance is my health problems. They are always lurking in the background. My daughter might get sick once a year, but even then she has only been sick enough to go to the doctor once and the medicine they gave her didn't even help. It just had to run it's course. I had another PAP come back positive for cervical changes again this summer. That makes the third one in about eleven or twelve years. The last one was just last year and the biopsy came back such low grade the doctor didn't even count it. This year I managed to get away without a biopsy, but she did do cervical curettage inside my cervix. That was more painful than I was expecting and worse because it takes longer than just snipping a piece off. Luckily, that came back negative for pre-cancer. I'm worried that my luck is running thin and feel that I need to eliminate a lot of my risk and have a hysterectomy. We've been trying to get pregnant again for almost three years now. I did finally get pregnant in July, but my levels quit doubling and I miscarried again in August. I think if I don't get pregnant in the next year that I will move forward with the hysterectomy. It's a scary and heartbreaking decision, but I'm tired. I'm tired of being terrified of every PAP. I'm tired of having horrible cramps. I'm tired of the pelvic pain that I have pretty much all the time. I'm tired of temping, tracking, waiting. I want my daughter to have a sibling. I think that is such an important bond. Someone to always have your back and someone you have when once the parents are gone. I don't want her to ever feel truly alone. She is growing up and the time truly goes way too fast. I don't want to spend any of her childhood stressing out about getting pregnant. I just want to enjoy it. She very well may be my only baby, so I need to soak it up that much more.

If you read my last post, then you know that I recently started a photography business. I really wanted to do something to honor my angel babies. It's not fair that I will never know who they would have been or get to have pictures of them. I made a picture that is very special to me. This picture has all of my babies in it. It's my precious daughter, my rainbow baby, surrounded by the siblings she'll never know. It isn't perfect, but I love it. I plan to do a few more and I really want one with me and my husband in it too. It will be the family picture we were robbed of. I have always wanted to be able to have some kind of reminder of my lost babies. I don't want it to be like they never existed and I don't other people to forget either. Some people get tattoos (and I plan on that too), some light a candle every October and there are other ways to remember them. I just needed something that made them more real, more tangible and for me this does it. What do you do remember your lost ones? Check out the picture below and I hope you all have a great day!