The first 15 years of our marriage were saturated by dreams of parenthood, and endless cycles of negative pregnancy tests, miscarriages, adoption losses, and three beautiful bring-home babies...
It has been just over 14 years since I had to begin re-learning how to communicate, after multiple catastrophic strokes. For the first few years, my memory was so bad that I could not complete a sentence without forgetting what i was trying to say. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” - John 3:16 Next week will mark 5 years since I first watched Susan Heck's A Call To Scripture Memory video and started trying long-passage Scripture memory as “brain training” for ongoing stroke recovery. (I clearly know that the date was Dec. 10, because this date marks a landmark related to our first daughter, Noel Alexis, who was born directly from my womb into Heaven back in 1994.) Brain training was only the start. After a decade of infertility with recurrent losses (multiple miscarriage and adoption losses), the failure of the business where we had hoped to raise our children (...
Any updates to this post will be found at JenniferSaake.blogspot.com/p/hannahs.html From 1992-2006, Rick and I prayed for children. We spent more than a decade seriously entrenched in the daily struggles of infertility, demanding costly emotional, medical, and financial investments. We opened our hearts to thirteen children we longed to parent. We grieved ten babies we did not get to raise (miscarriages and adoption losses). We've experienced the indescribable joy of parenting three living miracles. Since 1996, I've participated in a variety of online forums and platforms, first using pseudonyms related to Hannah , then over the past two decades, as @InfertilityMom . I founded Hannah's Prayer Ministries in 1994 , and authored Hannah's Hope: Seeking God's Heart in the Midst of Infertility, Miscarriage, and Adoption Loss in 2005. Please enjoy a free pdf version of the book introduction, my personal infertility / loss story...
Tomorrow will be the anniversary, my "re-birthday" when life stated over from square one. Thirteen years ago I heard the word "hypermobile" for the first time. I was 39 years old and a chiropractor had just rotated my neck and commented on my extreme flexibility. That first side of my neck adjusted upon first attempt, but the other side just wouldn't realign. After multiple attempts , my vertebral artery was ruptured in the back of my neck and I instantly experience two catastrophic (either should have been fatal) brain bleeds (strokes) there on the treatment table, initially triggering a seizure, blindness, slurred speech, and a rapid progression to loss of consciousness. I was in the hospital for nearly 2 months, shocking doctors that I even survived the first night. I had to relearn how to breathe without a machine, swallow, see, hear (we eventually discovered I had lost 70-90% of my hearing), sit up without two adults holding me, bladder control, and everyt...
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