She was 30-weeks pregnant when the doctors told her during a scan that her baby had no heartbeat.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on November 13, 2020. It has since been updated.
Vincent Van Gogh once said, “I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.”
It's true, isn't it? In the same way, the joy of holding a baby in one's arm is beyond words. The woman in this story did get to hold her lovely baby in her hands but it was full of grief because she was stillborn. However, she was also the reason that the mum got a new life.
Joann Pucciarelli, a resident of New York was the happiest person in the world when she went for a regular scan to see if her unborn baby was alright. However, her world turned upside down when the doctors told her that her little girl, Giorgiana, had no heartbeat.
Sharing her experience on her website, Fashionedge, Joann gave details of her IVF journey and wrote, "I struggled with infertility but was lucky to finally get pregnant with my daughter Olivia."
When her daughter turned 3, Joann and her husband decided to expand the family and began with IVF procedures once again. "I can't begin to tell you how excited we all were especially Olivia who was dreaming of having a baby sister," she wrote.
It was at her 30-week normal routine checkup on March 29, 2017, that she got the devastating news. "That was the worst day of my life," she said, and continued, "I had to go home to get all my belongings and prepare to have a c-section. No one can ever be prepared to deliver a child that is born 'sleeping.'”
Joann held Giorgiana, spent "some time with her and sang all the same songs we sang to Olivia," she penned. She revealed that more than the situation, Joann was sadder about explaining to her "4-year-old that her sister was now an angel in heaven. Instead of planning her arrival home, we were planning her funeral."
"The next few months were a blur, I had no choice but to keep on going if only for my daughter. I had to show her we were all going to be ok, even though I had no idea how," she wrote. One can understand the mother's grief, but it's really hard to understand what must be going on in the little girl's mind, who was expecting to be a big sister.
Through the grief and mourning, Joann planned to try again. As she planned her IVF cycle, the mum didn't realize that even though she had lost her baby, it was the only way the mother could have saved herself. Talking about her realization, Joann wrote, "We didn’t realize it then, but Giorgiana saved my life."
"As I was planning my next IVF cycle It was then that my fertility doctor forced me to get a mammogram. A few weeks later 7 months after losing my child I was diagnosed with Breast cancer. It felt like an outer-body experience, I could not believe this was happening to me and my family," she continued.
Her cancer had spread to her lymph nodes but considers herself "lucky" since they were able to diagnose it at an early stage. "If we would had waited any longer it would have kept spreading," she wrote.
Joann underwent a bilateral mastectomy, which was followed by 8 rounds of chemo and 28 rounds of radiation. Elaborating, she wrote, "During treatment, I was offered cold capping therapy, which is an insanely freezing cap (-35 degrees) you put on your head for an hour before chemo starts and 5 hours after it ends, that saved about 50-60% of my hair."
Joann divulged that though her journey was tough, she met some amazing people who shared her own story and encouraged her to get through her problems courageously. Concluding, she penned, "I hope that sharing my story would do the same."
References:
