“Colten has cCMV. We don’t know what the future holds, you’ll have to wait and see…” Part 1.
These are the words that were spoken to us after spending 2 weeks in the NICU not knowing why our sweet boy wasn’t getting better.
When our daughter was three, we decided to try for another baby. It took about a year before I finally became pregnant. Everyone was overjoyed, but that joy was short-lived. At eight weeks, we lost the baby.
That loss opened my eyes to how many women grieve miscarriages quietly, often without permission to mourn. Very few people even knew I was pregnant, and there was an unspoken expectation that I should simply move on. I wasn’t “that” far along, after all. One doctor told me it was “nature’s intuition.” I remember staring at him in disbelief as he explained, “Something was probably wrong, and your body just knew.”
I walked out of that office furious and devastated. I had already imagined that baby, already made plans. And suddenly, there was just emptiness. I put my grief into training for multiple half-marathons. Our hearts were broken.
After some time, we tried again. Years went by. Appointment after appointment ended the same way being told that everything “looked good,” but there was still no baby. Eventually, we came to terms with the idea that we might only have one child. We booked a trip to Disney and then came the positive pregnancy test!
Finding out I was pregnant a moment in the journey that we saw God vividly. I’m a wedding florist by trade, and that day I just felt off. On my way to a wedding, I stopped at Target and grabbed a pregnancy test. Positive.
I snapped a photo and texted it to my husband, and he replied, “Is that yours?” I laughed out loud and joked back, “Nope, it’s the lady in the stall next to me! Yes, it’s mine.”
In that moment, our hearts were filled with excitement and a cautious kind of hope.
This is one of those moments where it could only be God. I found out I was pregnant with Colten on August 23rd, almost the exact same time I had found out I was pregnant with Ashlynn ten years earlier. Colten’s due date was May 31, 2015, and Ashlynn’s had been May 30, 2005. Then Colten arrived two weeks early on May 16, 2015, just like Ashlynn, who was born two weeks early on May 18, 2005. Nearly ten years apart, almost to the day. It was a tangible reminder that God is in the details.
Colten’s birth was traumatic. I was in labor for 22 hours, and due to a severe reaction to Pitocin, we nearly lost both him and me. When he was finally born, he was immediately rushed to the NICU because his blood sugar was just 24, his oxygen levels were dangerously low, and his platelet count was critically low as well.
Those first days blurred together. We spent two long weeks in the NICU with no clear answers about what was wrong with our son. Every night I left the hospital defeated and exhausted, only to return the next morning trying to gather enough strength to hope again. The NICU has a way of draining hope quickly if you let it.
The doctors were stumped. Over and over, we heard the words, “We just don’t know.” Finally, as a last-ditch effort, they tested Colten for a wide range of viruses. His urine test came back positive for Cytomegalovirus.
The nurse shared the result like it was routine, almost casual. But when the doctor came in next and asked us to sit down, the tone changed. We knew immediately this was anything but routine. This was life-altering.
We learned that Colten had congenital Cytomegalovirus (cCMV), a serious virus with an unpredictable outcome. Some children die from it. Others show no symptoms at all. At that point, Colten had already failed his hearing test three times in his left ear, and imaging showed calcifications on his brain. Those were the only known effects when we left the hospital. We were told we’d have to Wait and See…