After what felt like an eternity, the doctor’s tense posture relaxed just a fraction, but the look on his face was heavy with an profound sadness. He slowly turned away from the monitor, looked directly into my tear-filled eyes, and leaned in close.

He whispered one single sentence that shattered my entire world into a million pieces, revealing a truth about my pregnancy and the physical toll of the assault that changed the course of my life forever.
He told me that while the baby’s heart was miraculously still beating, the placental abruption caused by the trauma meant they had to perform an emergency emergency C-section immediately—and there was a severe complication they hadn’t seen coming.