Imaginary Friend

In 2015, my daughter, Alexis, was three years old and her father and I were trying to conceive a second child.

I would later find out that I had Poly Cystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) and that was the reason why I was having difficult conceiving.

One day, out of the blue, my daughter Alexis started having full conversations with somebody. I imagined she had an imaginary friend and she was discussing heavy three-year-old subjects with them. I asked her who she was speaking to, and she told me she was talking to her “baby sister, Ella”.

Obviously I thought that was pretty weird but I just kind of nodded and accepted it as toddler fact, not wanting to destroy her imagination.

Alexis talked to Ella several times daily. Then, sure enough, two weeks later, I took a pregnancy test and it was positive. Alexis knew I was pregnant before I did.

She continued talking to Baby Ella several times every single day for about three more weeks, and then she abruptly stopped. I didn’t realize at the time what it meant.

At my 8 week ultrasound, I went in to the office and they couldn’t find a heartbeat. They tried every single thing they possibly could have. And they did find the baby, but it appeared to have stopped growing at about five and a half weeks gestation – approximately the same time Alexis stopped talking to Baby Ella.

The baby was dead. Obviously this was crushing news as we had been trying to conceive for months. But my body didn’t recognize that the baby was deceased. I was experiencing what is called a Missed Miscarriage, where the body does not abort the dead fetal tissue as it does not recognize that a miscarriage has taken place.

I ended up carrying the deceased baby for five more weeks, until I was 13 weeks “pregnant”, before my body began expelling the tissue. I was in hair school at the time and my doctor had given me some medication to induce the miscarriage and abort the tissue, which I was going to start on that night, as it was a Friday.

I was washing an elderly woman’s hair when the miscarriage began naturally. I felt it start and I excused myself and asked someone else to take over for me while I headed to the restroom in the back, hoping it would pass and I could carry on with my day.

In the restroom, I started hemorrhaging. I was losing so much blood, and it wasn’t stopping. After about half an hour I realized I couldn’t just pass it and carry on with my day. I called through the door for the school supervisor, and she came in and saw what admittedly looked like a murder scene. I wanted to just put some garbage bags down in my car and drive home but she insisted on calling for the ambulance.

Thank god she did.

The paramedics came and strapped me to a stretcher and took me to the hospital, which was about an eight minute ride from the academy. The paramedic wheeled me to the check in desk, and I wasn’t there a whole minute before I remember telling the paramedic that I felt really dizzy, but my voice was so weak, I don’t think he heard me.

I had a Grande Mal seizure, I’m told, which I don’t remember, but what I do remember is waking up in another room with about six medical professionals all standing around me. They had cut my dress off me and were trying to find a vein – I had lost too much blood and had gone into hemorrhagic shock, which had caused my seizure.

The really tricky part is that my blood type is O Negative. So my fellow O Negative blood types, please allow me to shamelessly ask you to please donate. Your blood saved me, it’s the only type I can receive.

When I came around I was kind of out of it for a few minutes but eventually started to remember where I was and what was happening. They asked me who I wanted to call. I got my brother to pick Alexis up from daycare and I got them to call her father, who was halfway through a 6 hour drive to go see his dying mother in a hospital in another city. He and I aren’t together anymore but I still feel for him and what he went through that day. He was faced with the decision to continue on his way to see his mother, who was in a coma and wouldn’t know he was there, or turn around and drive the three hours back to me and support me through this abnormal miscarriage.

I’m gonna be honest with you. I legitimately thought I was going to die that day. And you really don’t realize the type of person you are until you’re faced with a situation like that.

If I was going to die, I didn’t want the last thing I ever did on this earth to be holding this man back from saying goodbye to his dying mother. So I told him to keep going and that I was in good hands and I would be fine on my own.

So he went. And I had an emergency surgery to get the remaining fetal tissue out of my body and try to replenish my blood supply. I wasn’t capable of even sitting up for about 24 hours, as the blood loss made me very dizzy.

I lived though. The surgery and the seizure and the blood loss combined all made me feel like I’d been hit by a train, but I survived. I spent the night in the hospital and was released and went home – and that’s when the emotions started.

It was at this point that I started to recognize that Alexis really was talking to the baby. The timelines all matched up. So, I believed her, that it would have been a girl, and her name absolutely was Ella. Had this baby made it and been born, I would have named her Ella Rose. And that is the significance of the rose tattoo on my shoulder.

I have other tattoos as well. I have four birds on my wrist, three coloured in black and one just outlined. The three coloured in are myself and my two living children, and the outlined bird is Ella Rose. And I have a sleeve of roses, three roses, one for each of my children, both living and passed.

I know this story sounds difficult. And it was. I wrote letters to Ella Rose, apologizing to her that I couldn’t be her mommy and that we would see each other some day. But, I survived.

I thought I was going to die. Honestly, a near death experience changes you. You appreciate your life more. You live harder. You feel harder. You forgive faster.

I am thankful for the lessons that Ella Rose taught me, and she will always be remembered. She is a part of me and a part of my story. She is loved.

She died in a state of perfection. Complete innocence, and her memory is untarnished by life and the negativity that it contains. She was, is, and always will be perfect. She is beautiful.

And that is the story behind my rose tattoo.