“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.”
~ John Irving, The Ciderhouse Rules

During July 2013, weeks after moving across the US to start medical residency, I found out that I was pregnant. I had to make many wrenching decisions. My first heartbreaking, deliberate act of motherhood was to file for divorce.

I had a healthy, normal, full-term pregnancy followed by a complicated, traumatic labor and delivery in February 2014. My son Sacha was born with an unexpected and rare brain tumor. He was born crying (APGARs 8 & 8), but he was coagulopathic and he soon bled out into his scalp bruises. He was removed from life support the day after his birth.

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