Ashley's
anencephalic Story

When we got home, we called close friends and family to let them know the situation.  It was hard for me to repeat the story over and over again.  But sometimes you have to.  We called my coworker and one of our best friends, to make sure it was alright to take a day or two off, so that we could just be together and think for a little bit.  Work was so wonderful.  They said to take off and told us not to come back until we were ready.

Our thoughts were so confused.  What are you supposed to do? What? We didn’t know!!  We also called my mother, brother and my father.  All of them, were very shocked and disheartenment at the news.  I think my father in particular had a very hard time.  There have only been a few times in my life that I have heard him really become emotional.  This was one of them.

We were just so emotionally spent that we just sat at home for quite a while.  We were totally drained of energy and emotion.  We watched some TV, but I couldn’t tell you what we watched.  We felt like tuning out the world but couldn’t really do that either.
That evening several people brought us prepared food for us to cook.  They wanted to help in any way that they could.  We also were told that many people were talking with God on our behalf. At the time this helped us.  However, we couldn’t begin to imagine how helpful this would be by the time this ordeal was over with.

I believe that our appointment was on a Wednesday.  We took several days off, mostly because we were still in a state of shock.  We couldn’t even really think about the decision that we had to make.

We decided to drive to Battle Creek for the weekend and visit more with my mother-in-law.  I believe one of the reasons that we did this was because we didn’t want to be alone.  Sitting alone was not doing the job of getting our minds diverted to something else.
After church on Saturday (we are Seventh-Day-Adventists), we went to friend’s house from my wife’s childhood.  While there our little girl was the topic of conversation.  What should we do?  We received advice going both ways.  We discussed main reason for termination which was having the baby would drag out the heartache and pain and keep it going on and on.  They didn’t want us to be in pain for so long.  The main reason we discussed for carrying the baby was that she was a life and a human being.