The story of our baby boy Eli Hutchings

We would like to thank everyone for their support, thoughts, and prayers over the last few days and continued support and prayers. It has helped knowing that we have such wonderful people surrounding us during this time.

Here's Eli's story....

On Thursday, Carrie called the midwives because she hadn’t felt little Eli move for 2 days and was really worried. When she went in to see them, they confirmed there was no longer a heartbeat. Aaron was in Donnelly for work that day and couldn’t get home right away so Carrie’s mom came over to be with her and convinced her to go to the ER. At the ER, a couple of ultrasounds were done which again confirmed that Eli was no longer living. Carrie had to have some blood drawn so they could do some tests to determine whether her health was in danger at all. When those tests came back showing that Carrie was in good health, we had some time to decide how we would like to proceed. We had the option of waiting and seeing if Carrie spontaneously went into labor or we could choose to induce labor.

Aaron got to hospital and we eventually decided to go home that night and come back the next morning to start an induction. So, we got to the hospital at 8am the next morning (Friday, August 28th). They ran some tests (an amniocentesis and some blood work) and then started the induction with Cytotec at about 10am. The induction took much longer than we were hoping but once Carrie felt the need to push, it was only about 3 minutes until little Eli was born at 12:50am on Saturday August 29th, 2009. He weighed in at 1 pound, 10 ounces and was 11 ¾ inches long. We were both exhausted and Carrie was still a little out of it from the Stadol that the nurse had given her about a ½ hour before Eli was born to help her relax but we were able to rest a little bit. Then, a professional photographer from Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep (they take professional pictures of stillborn babies for free) came and did a photo shoot with Eli and Aaron and Carrie at 3:30am. After that, we were able to sleep for a few hours and then spend the next day just holding and spending some time with Eli. His grandparents and two of his aunts were able to come meet him and say goodbye to him. His big sister Eva Grace also had the opportunity to come meet her little brother and give him kisses and take some family pictures with him.
Aaron and Carrie then had some more alone time with Eli to say their goodbyes and then came home at about 3:00pm and were able to get a good night’s sleep last night in our own bed. We had an amazing team of doctors and nurses with us at the hospital (the on call doc that we got on Thursday and Friday was the best doc we could have asked for) and were able to talk with a bereavement counselor several times as well as a financial person to help us figure out all the financial and insurance stuff. It has been amazing how many little blessings we have been able to see through this tragedy already.

We are now waiting on the results of the amnio and bloodwork as well as an autopsy that we chose to have done on Eli to try to determine what caused his death and to determine how likely it is that it may happen with future pregnancies. Eli had something called Hydrops which is a lot of excess fluid around all his organs which can cause heart failure. What we don't know is what caused the hydrops (there are numerous different things that could cause hydrops) but we do know there was nothing that anyone could have done to prevent it.

We were blessed to have had Eli with us for the short time that we did and while we wanted him so badly to have stayed with us for much longer, we trust that he is now in the arms of Jesus.

This has by far been the most difficult thing we have ever been handed and we know it will continue to be difficult for quite a while but through everything we know that we have a God who loves us and is worthy to be praised.