Happy Birthday Mom!

Today is my mom's birthday. We are excited that we will (very) soon have a new addition to our family and will be naming her Elizabeth, after my mother. If my mom were still alive she would be 61. She is sorely missed, but I know that if she were alive today, she wouldn't be very healthy. She was such a wonderful person and mother. She taught me that the most important thing that you can give to a person is love. Even after my mother had passed we felt that she blessed us with our son.

In August of 2005 my mom went into the hospital because she was hemorrhaging. It turned out that she had stage 4 cervical cancer. Side note: Please make sure that all of the women that you love know that they need to continue to get their annual or bi-annual OB check-ups so you can avoid a loss that is preventable. After very aggressive treatments at one of the best hospitals in the world in Boston, MA, the cancer was undetected, but the treatments had ravaged her body. At one of her next check-ups in VA in they found more traces. She had surgery to have it removed, but had to go to the hospital on many occasions to have blood transfusions because the original treatments had left her with internal bleeding. For those of you knew my mom, you know that she hated needles. After many times of being in and out of the hospital she decided to let go on April 19th, 2006.

I truly believe that it was her choice and that she was no longer afraid because I know that she would have called me to bring her into the hospital. I got the worst call of my life at 5am that morning from my dad. It was the longest 5 minute ride to her house that morning, we even ran a red light because we couldn't wait any longer. When I saw my mom, through the grief somehow I had an overwhelming feeling that I was going to have a baby. I just put the thought aside because we had been trying for 3 years and almost thought it was impossible. I was late but took repeated pregnancy tests already and they were negative because I wasn't pregnant yet. I never got my period, but one month later I found out that I was pregnant. The conception date per the doctor's office was within days of when my mom died.

Our wonderful son, with a temperament not unlike my mother's was born on December 29th, 2006 (3 and 1/2 weeks early). I've always felt like he was a gift from my mother and feel so blessed to have had a mother like her.