For as long as I can remember in my adult years and as a married woman, having a child was my lowest priority. Modern economic burdens, my own career aspirations, and traveling the world with my husband were always more pressing to me. In fact, it was actually hard for me to imagine bringing a life into this world with so much uncertainty—but all of that changed one day.
It is no secret that I have had more than your typical share of physical health issues. Two rare chronic diseases have contributed to many years of nerve and muscular pain, joint dislocations, soft tissue injuries, infections, and more. The sheer quantity of daily symptoms makes it difficult to navigate when new or acute health issues arise, which was one of many reasons I found myself on death's door with sepsis in 2018.
This time, my symptoms were, yet again, lower back pain, nausea, fatigue, frequent urination, and more joint pain than common for me. Many of which I experienced on a regular basis, and most of which sent me spiraling back to the blood infection nightmare of the year prior. This time, though, there was one additional symptom that made me wonder if there was something else much more typical at play here—breast tenderness.
As someone with cups that runneth over, I was no stranger to my chest and back often hurting, but this was different. It hurt to walk, it hurt to stand, and it especially hurt to do jumping jacks (yes, I was doing jumping jacks regularly for some wild reason). This symptom was ultimately what made me realize it wasn't another freak health scare I was experiencing—I was pregnant. Days turned into weeks and that glorious time of the month never arrived, and I knew. I was scared. I wasn't mentally prepared for a child. This wasn't in our current plan, or budget for that matter.
As many mothers-to-be do, though, my mind began imagining the possibilities. While not all people in my situation would've or could've changed their mind about having a child, for a brief season I did. I decided I liked the idea of bringing another soul into the world and striving to give them the best of me. I believed my husband would too, and I began planning on how I would tell him the news.
I sat in bed one night, with my eyes shut tight and my mind racing. As I sat there in silence, I felt a small hand brush across mine startling me because no one was visibly there. Seeing, hearing, and feeling spirits was nothing new to me. After all, I'd had "mediumship abilities" since my youth that I had long wished away for "fear of being evil". I didn't think too much of it and ended up calling it a night shortly after and going to sleep. My dreams were vivid, our bedroom danced with buzzing energies that I was consciously aware of as my spirit watched my human self sleep.
Startled awake, my husband and I looked around our dark room to see nothing out of the ordinary, and we soon returned back to our dreams. A young female spirit smiled and waved at me in my dream world, we spent some time together chatting about various things that were important to us in the astral realm, and then I watched as she gently drifted out of my sight.
I was miscarrying and she was exiting this earth before she had ever truly arrived.
The next day, I lived through the horrors of what no hopeful mother-to-be ever believes they'll experience. Laid up in the bathroom, in physical and emotional pain like I hadn't experienced before my body spontaneously aborted the sweet girl I had just met the night before.
I choked through words I never thought I'd have to say to my husband. We were pregnant. His confusion stabbed my already aching heart and I watched as he began to grieve with me. How in a moment's time he was forced to process what I had been grappling with for weeks—and I don't know if that was better or worse.
That night we lay in bed, me sobbing, and my husband silent—when suddenly he gasped, the noise slicing through the suffocating air of our room. He motioned to the other side of the bed to our television. It was off, the screen black—but drawn onto the surface was a name: Ahn. The name of our daughter. We grieved but also felt comfort. It was a brief encounter with her, that though short, meant the world to me—and gave us hope to one day try again.