Rowan Vale

In memory of a life I loved with all my heart, but never got to hold. In honor of the day that profoundly changed the rest of our lives.

Apr 11, 2025

Last night I couldn’t sleep to save my life. As I tossed and turned, I felt frustrated. It took several hours for me to realize that my body has and will likely always keep score. That my body wouldn’t let my mind forget. The phantom tugging feeling on my lower right side increased while I laid awake in the dark. The cold sweats, the headache, the lump in the back of my throat all somatically reminded me of what this body has endured.

A year ago today, I woke up unknowingly pregnant. I spent the morning in webinars and on telehealth calls, and then my husband asked me to join him to run an errand and grab lunch. We hadn’t gotten much time together recently, and we tried to steal these uninterrupted daytime moments when we could.

I remember getting out of the car at the restaurant and telling him that I was experiencing some pain on my right side, below my waist. It wasn’t unbearable, just uncomfortable. I told him it felt like something was pulling. A voice inside of me that sounded completely fictitious at the time said something that in that moment both felt and sounded ridiculous - “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that this might be what an ectopic pregnancy would feel like.” but that wasn’t possible. We’d tried to conceive for seven years. We were told we could only get pregnant with technological intervention. We never used protection - we had no known reason to. Plus a baby, a spontaneous pregnancy - it would’ve been a miracle. We both knew my body probably couldn’t handle another round of IVF, and my emotions were pretty fraught by that time too; the twins had died two and a half years prior and I was still in many ways trying to work through that trauma. But if I happened to “fall pregnant” - what a monumental moment that would’ve been. What an answer to all of those ‘bigger than life and death’ questions that I’d put out into the universe throughout seasons of infertility and pregnancy losses.

We ate, slowly, and then we came home.

I felt incomprehensibly thirsty, so I went into the kitchen to fill a water bottle. Immediately, I felt dizzy and nauseous, and I found myself laying down on the wood floor beneath me.

Some time passed, and I stood up, climbed the stairs, took of my outside clothes, and before I could even put on pajamas, I laid down in my bed with a searing of pain in my abdomen. Two seconds later I vomited without warning - the first and only time in my adult life I haven’t had enough heads up from my body to make it to the bathroom or even to a garbage can.

I yelled out for my husband, and sort of flung myself onto the floor. I attempted to pull over a blanket, but I remember that it felt like I couldn’t move. I tried to crawl towards the bathroom, but I didn’t make it more than a few inches before collapsing into a heap. Which is exactly where and how my husband found me.

He stripped our bed, and then tried to get me dressed, but he was barely able to slide a nightgown over my head. He asked if I could get up. We both knew the answer. He said he was going to call 911. I told him to give me a few minutes, I just needed time to lay there before I could move again. He did a once over, and took out his phone. I wasn’t strong enough to argue.

The next thing I knew, I was being loaded onto a stretcher and carried out of my house, where I blacked out twice in the space between the floor and the ambulance.

The ten minute ride to the closest ER felt like it took forever. It hurt to breathe. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

Within a half hour, initial bloodwork showed a sky high white blood cell count (immediate notification of infection), and news that I never expected to hear —

“You’re Pregnant.”

I’m sorry, what?

That’s not possible.

Wait.

Could that be possible?

Could this be real?

Tell me the number. What’s the beta HCG?

“It’s over 6,000.”

I know what that means. That means likely about 5-7 weeks gestation. How? How is this real? More importantly, how did I not know? How on this earth did I not know there was a miracle growing in my body?

“Is the pregnancy viable?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“We need to do an ultrasound. We’re worried your appendix might’ve ruptured. But if the baby is alive, we can’t jump to a CT scan.”

I looked at my husband. How? For real? Are we really standing here? Could this be the miracle we begged the universe for?

I knew enough to know when the tech couldn’t find anything with an external ultrasound wand that the pregnancy was early, confirming my initial mental timeline. In our experience with IVF, they didn’t switch from internal ultrasounds to external ones until the beginning of the second trimester. When the wand was inserted, the tech’s expression changed. I asked if I could see the screen. She said no. She moved the wand around quite a bit, and then removed it, and told me the doctor would come in and talk to us.

An eternity passed.

It was likely 15 minutes.

“The baby implanted in your fallopian tube, which has ruptured, and the amount of blood free floating in your body is of significant cause for concern. You’ll need surgery immediately if you’re going to survive.”

As I drifted in and out of consciousness, I couldn’t make the tears stop coming. I remember feeling really cold, and I remember asking my husband if we could try again to get pregnant now that I knew it was possible. I had a very one track mind, even in a nearly unconscious state. I still desperately wanted to have another baby. I could barely process how close we’d come to that dream coming true, only to have it ripped away in an instant. If this happened once, could it happen again? We both knew that wasn’t the time to have that conversation.

He held my hand as they pushed the gurney down the hall. I met the surgeon in the next hallway over as she rushed to my side. She was already wearing scrubs and I told her I was afraid. I don’t remember anything that she said in response.

I don’t remember being in the OR, or the moment that they sedated me. I don’t really remember drifting in and out of awareness in the PACU after surgery. I don’t remember the apple juice and the graham crackers they forced me to eat.

I just remember the pain.

Internally, I felt like hell. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach over and over and over again. My abdominal muscles were rendered useless. It was hard to move, even to turn over, on my own.

Emotionally, I felt like a black hole had swallowed me. I’d found out I was miraculously pregnant and I’d lost a baby - all in the same day. Well, my knowledge of it anyway. Rowan, who wasn’t named until several weeks later, had likely been with me for about 6.5 or 7 weeks - and I didn’t know. My body kept it a secret. I felt utterly betrayed. I felt like I was living inside a body I couldn’t trust. And more than that - I lost an organ, I lost my chance at ever carrying another baby, I lost myself, and I lost what felt like any will to live. I was devastated. I was broken, possibly beyond repair.

I was kept in the hospital until nearly dinner time, 24 hours after arriving in the ER, and I left as a shell of a human; barely agreeing to function. I was both shattered and numb, in disbelief and shock.

I remember texting my therapist a handful of updates from start to finish, followed by “We have a hell of a lot to talk about. How on earth did I just end up with another dead baby?”

Four days later, I started a new job, per the contract I’d signed two weeks prior. I told nobody anything. But every single morning, from the time my alarm went off until nearly lunch, I suffered through paralyzing anxiety, intense gastrointestinal distress, and heartbreak so deep I actually returned to the ER presenting with overly concerning chest pains, afraid I was having a heart attack.

You all know what came next. The impossible season, the one I’m lucky to have made it out alive from. Crippling Postpartum Depression and Extreme Postpartum Anxiety. What felt like a million medication trials - none of which made anything better. Then the choice which wasn’t actually a choice at all to try utilizing Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy - the treatment that saved my life. The treatment that brought me back to life. The treatment that has accelerated and transformed my trauma recovery and the slow and critical parts of identifying, observing, processing and healing.

Today, this morning, I got out of bed without having really slept, and my heart felt so heavy. As I climbed into the shower, I found myself uncontrollably sobbing. My body needed the release. But then I put myself back together, for now anyway. I’m at my desk after working all day and parenting my kindergartner all night and I can still feel my feet on the floor. I’m grounded, because I have to be. This day felt impossible, and yet, here I am having achieved everything I set out to this morning - attending work meetings on camera, spending after school time with my daughter including completing a new Lego set together, taking her to ballet class, picking up dinner and groceries, and sharing with her the sweetest bedtime, and now, I’m making a packing list for a weekend of family fun events downtown. I’m not just surviving. I’m actually legitimately living again. And it’s taken a hell of a long time to even feel safe saying that out loud - but if I admit it publicly, then I’m allowing myself to acknowledge that this is currently my truth.

AND, despite that truth, despite the dramatic amount of progress I’ve made and the tremendous amount of work I’ve done in recovery, today still holds so much heartache. Today still holds so many painful memories. Today still feels like a palpable loss. Today all I can think about is who I was before that day, and who I became after it.

Today I wonder more deeply and for longer what Rowan would’ve been like had I delivered him at term in December. He’d be five months old and I’d be entirely different. Life would be entirely different.

But alas, it’s not. So instead, I write.

I wrote the story of what happened to us, not so I never forget - it’s scientifically impossible for me to forget, but so that maybe someone else who experiences something similar can find it and feel seen, heard and less alone. I wrote it so that you understand what I went through that day, and how that day dramatically changed all the rest of the days. I wrote, so you understand exactly what was the straw that broke the camels back - the trauma that outdid all of the other traumas, the one that I couldn’t come back from without significant intervention.

And to sweet baby Rowan, I leave you with this: