Below is a personal essay written by News 5 anchor Courtney Gousman about the difficulty she had becoming pregnant and how the childhood trauma of losing her own mother to a pregnancy complication made her pregnancy journey even scarier.
Pregnancy is a delicate dance for many women that can be made up of joy, anticipation, and fear.
I felt all of those things in March of 2021 when I discovered I was expecting. At that point, pregnancy was a goal I had been chasing for nearly a decade, but I had come to terms with the fact that I may never be a mother, with biological children of my own.
My pregnancy came after six failed IVF procedures and a myomectomy (to remove fibroids from my uterus) sandwiched in there, over the course of eight years.
When I discovered I was pregnant, it was the first time I’d ever seen a positive pregnancy test—and despite me praying for this miracle for years, I was scared.
My fears dated back to when I was 15 years old— when I lost my mom.
My mom was my everything—a natural nurturer—a nurse and hospital administrator with a Master’s degree (I watched her earn every bit of that degree as she raised two girls).
My mom also became pregnant as she dealt with a tremendous amount of stress in both her work and personal life. She was 38, and her pregnancy was a miracle all its own. She was left with one fallopian tube after suffering an ectopic pregnancy and several miscarriages, attempting to have a third child.
When she found out she was pregnant—and it would be her first boy—she was elated, and despite the risks associated with her miracle pregnancy, she was determined to bring this life into the world.
Prior to her pregnancy, my mom had already been diagnosed with hypertension (high blood pressure) and was taking medication to control it—but her pregnancy exasperated the situation. She was in and out of the hospital dealing with a severe case of pre-eclampsia, also known as toxemia.
My mother’s blood pressure would shoot sky-high—near stroke levels—which would prompt her to be hospitalized. Doctors had warned—there was no way she could carry this child full-term. One of them—or both of them would not make it.
About six months into her pregnancy, doctors reached the point that they were starting to give her steroids to develop the baby boy in her belly, so they could take him early.
She was allowed to come home and was instructed to remain on bed rest while monitoring her pressure. If things changed, she’d have to be hospitalized again.
Sept. 8, 1997 was the last time she came home. The very next day, I kissed her goodbye as I made my way to school. That would be the last time I saw my mom alive. When I came home from cheerleading practice that evening, I was met with a house full of people. My godmother grabbed me as I came in the door and told me that my mom did not make it.
“What was she talking about??? My mother was fine when I left this morning.”
Confusion set in, and then reality. My mom died in my childhood home—and that baby boy she was carrying had to be delivered by emergency cesarean, and he’s never been held by his mother.
That little baby boy weighed less than a pound and I could hold him in the palm of one hand. He was far from where he needed to be to survive out of the womb, and doctors told us the first 48 hours were critical…then 72 hours…and then a week.
Slowly time went by as this premature baby boy was hooked up to a multitude of tubes and machines as he lay in an incubator. My little brother remained in the NICU for months, before he was finally able to come home, as a healthy, growing tiny baby boy.
Today, my brother is 25. His name is Alex and we often share stories with him about how amazing our mother was. He never got to meet her.
Living through the trauma of losing my mom through pregnancy, initially, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have children. But once I decided that I really DID want children, I was determined to have them much earlier in life, compared to my mother’s last pregnancy.
But God has a funny way of laughing at our plans. As hard as I tried—pregnancy just seemed to elude me…that is until I reached the same age my mom was when she found out she was pregnant for the final time.
For me, the fear was instant. But I was grateful for a stellar medical team and to those in my circle who comforted me throughout my pregnancy journey—letting me know everything was going to be fine.
After my son Johnathan was born in November 2021, he’d often look up to the heavens, and smile and laugh as if he was looking at something or someone familiar. I can’t help but think about his Grandma Karen, the nurturing nurse, who held him for safekeeping all these years, and helped to usher him here when the time was right.
This personal essay is part of 'Delivering Better Results,' a series of reports about maternal and infant mortality in Northeast Ohio, and access to healthcare in rural Ohio counties.