The Day Our Lives Changed Forever

These photos were taken July 15, 2016, moments after we found out Emily was pregnant for the first time.

A year before, Emily had been diagnosed with a rare cancer of the eye. Though she’d already been deemed cancer-free, she still had to go periodically for MRIs to ensure the disease hadn’t returned. That’s why she’s wearing a hospital gown here.

We had just started trying to conceive, so on the test’s registration paperwork, Emily marked that she might be pregnant — which meant she had to take a blood test to see if she was prior to being scanned.

After what seemed like an eternity, the nurse told us the results and that the MRI would have to wait, because our lives were about to change forever.

And she was right. Our lives did change forever — just not in the way we thought they would.

That pregnancy would end 54 days later, at 11 weeks. Three more pregnancy losses would follow for a total of five lost children.

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Armed with this hindsight, it feels a little strange seeing those pictures now. I look at Emily, and she seems so innocent, so wide-eyed, so uninhibitedly happy. You can’t see me, but on the other side of the camera, I was in a state of shock and overwhelm. I drove back to my office that afternoon in a haze, fortunate to have stopped at all the red lights.

Still, I was thankful. We had begun trying only a month earlier, and just like that, we had succeeded. Everything seemed easy. Everything seemed…meant to be. Little did we know.

The three years since have been unlike any others I’ve experienced. But regardless of all that’s happened — or maybe because of all that’s happened — I remain just as grateful today as I was back then.

Because we still have a chance.

We still have the chance to keep going. We still have the chance to become parents. We still have the chance to once again give Emily that expression of elation she has in the pictures above, and we still have the chance to make me feel just as overwhelmed.

And that’s more than we can ask for.

So here’s to the child we learned about that day, and to the hope that we will one day meet its sibling.