Just Keep Praying:
A Journey about Life, Death, and Living
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
My pregnancy was different this time. I was so sick during the first half of my pregnancy. I had the worse case of morning sickness. I remember waking up and begging God to make it stop and then one day it all went away. I felt great. I maintained an acceptable weight and never developed high blood pressure, which had been a problem when I was pregnant with Felicia.
Since my pregnancy was considered high risk, the doctors kept a close eye on me but I was doing great. The doctors did an ultrasound, but I did not want to know the sex of the baby. In my heart I knew it was a boy, but I didn’t want them to tell me anything for sure.
My memory gets a little hazy here. I am not sure of the exact time, but I think around 11:30, when the night shift did their rounds, the nurse came in to check my vital signs. I was very groggy from the sleeping pills, but I remember that when she put the fetal scope (I guess that is what it was called) we couldn’t hear a heart beat. She explained that the baby was getting into the birthing position and that there wasn’t anything to worry about. I guess I thought it must be normal because the nurse did not seem to be concerned. Since I was so dopey, I just fell right back to sleep. I hated myself for a long time. I was a mother, how could I not know something was wrong?
The next thing I remember it was somewhere around 6:00 in the morning. A nurse came in to hook me up to the fetal heart monitor (I can’t tell you if they had been coming in through the night or not, I really don’t have a clue; I just know that early that morning everything started happening). The nurses moved quickly and when they were not getting answers from the machine they decided to send me downstairs for an ultra sound. My mind was so dopey it was still not clicking that there was something wrong.
I remember lying on the stretcher and being wheeled into a small cold room. There was a radiologist and maybe an assistant or the nurse in the room. As he begins the ultra sound, he starts talking about what we were seeing. “Here is the head and if you follow this line down you can see the internal organs.” As he traced a path he continued, “If you look closely you can see the liver.” Since he was explaining everything so matter of fact I just assumed everything must be fine, so I asked, “So everything is alright then?”
I still cannot believe his response. “No, there is no heartbeat.” Just like that with no emotion or caring or anything. I still feel sick to my stomach when I think about it and still find myself getting angry. How could someone be so uncaring? I remember feeling like I needed to throw up. My mind was having a hard time processing the information. How could this be? How could there be no heartbeat?
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Fourteen years in the making, Just Keep Praying: A Journey about Life, Death, and Living will take you on a journey that could forever change how you look at life and death. Susan started the journey more than forty years ago.
Have you ever felt that God has abandoned you? Susan did; however, she was able to reconnect to God in a very special way.
Just Keep Praying will take you on Susan’s journey, but it may not be so different than your own journey. As you read through the journey, you may see yourself in the anger, fear, happiness, and other emotions that Susan shares with raw honesty. You will come away from this experience with renewed hope and understanding that prayer can help you through your journey of life. Yes you can survive tragedy—but more than that, you can learn to thrive after a tragedy.
About the Author
Susan Claxton is an educator and professional helper. She holds a master’s degree in human services and a doctorate in naturopathy. She has been teaching students in the area of helping for eighteen years. Relevant to this book, she has taught classes on death, dying, and bereavement as well as suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention. She also leads a group for survivors of suicide. Susan has presented at various national and regional conferences for human services since 1990 on subjects including respite for children and adults with disabilities, grief, suicide, organ transplantation, Native American culture, and personal growth and development. Additionally, she is a Christian and has been fortunate to overcome significant losses in her life through God’s grace. While this is Susan’s debut non-fiction book, she has authored a peer-reviewed journal article on organ transplantation and has written a few poems that were published in the Old Red Kimono magazine.