Answers

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." ~Rainer Maria Rilke

BT and I met with Kathryn's doctor at UAB today to go over the results of the autopsy.  I've stayed mum about this for a while, knowing for a few days that we had this meeting.  For some reason, this waiting, this anticipation, has been a very private thing for me, a reverent occurrence.  I wanted to give the waiting the respect that it deserved.
 
Kathryn's thoracic duct had completely ruptured.  The pathologist's report called it, "spontaneous intrauterine rupture of the thoracic duct." 
 
A common cause of hydrops is something called Congenital Chylothorax.  This is when there is a leak in the thoracic duct.  In Kathryn's case, the rupture was so severe, the pathologist was unable to even find and identify the duct in autopsy. 
 
Everything else was normal: heart, brain, bowels, kidneys, etc.  Hers was a freak occurence: most likely the thoracic duct never formed right in the first place, and at some point during the pregnancy, it simply ruptured.  There's no way of knowing what caused it to rupture, but more than that, there is nothing any of us (myself, doctors, or nurses) could have done to prevent it from happening.  In addition, even if the doctors had known before she died that it had ruptured, there would have been zero they could have done to fix it.
 
There's a certain peace in knowing...a certain calm in understanding.
 
I could ask God why lightening apparently struck our family, why this random mechanical glitch took our little girl....
 
But it won't bring her back. 
 
It helps me to have these answers, to know that God is in control, even when things don't go our way.
 
I feel, as my dad said, LIGHTER.
 
Grace and Peace, friends. 
 
Grace and Peace.