MILLCREEK — A birthday celebration Friday at St. Mark’s Hospital carried extra emotional weight, as a mother and father remembered their son who passed away during childbirth.
Remembering Hunter's second birthday
Eliza and Cody Sorenson and their 9-month-old daughter, Oakley, joined caregivers in remembering Hunter on the day when he would have turned two.
“We still miss Hunter, we still love him, and wish that he was here with us,” Eliza Sorenson said.
The diagnosis and loss
Eliza said in 2024, she was 22 weeks pregnant when she learned Hunter had a rare disease involving both kidneys and a lack of amniotic fluid was inhibiting the healthy growth of the baby’s lungs.
“Because of the lack of fluid, his lungs would never grow in a way that would sustain life, and so we were told the best-case scenario would be that Hunter would be born alive but live for just minutes,” the mother said. “My husband Cody and I were really devastated by this news.”
She delivered Hunter at 24 weeks.
“Unfortunately, during the childbirth process, Hunter passed away,” Eliza said. “I remember waking up the next day after giving birth to him, and that’s kind of when reality hit that, you know, we’re not going to get to take our beautiful son home with us.”
Navigating the grieving process
The weeks after that were also deeply painful.
“The coming days we spent picking out a casket for Hunter, picking out a headstone for Hunter — just things you don’t expect you’re ever going to have to do as a parent,” Eliza said. “We much rather would have been picking out a crib or a stroller.”
A doctor's perspective on heartache
Dr. Jennifer Kinghorn, Sorenson’s obstetrician-gynecologist at St. Mark’s, acknowledged it’s the kind of experience that can make a mother question if she will ever have a child.
“It’s hard to see that heartache of something they really want, and it doesn’t happen when it’s out of their control,” Kinghorn said. “I, myself, in growing my family had a couple of miscarriages and so … I know what that feels like.”
Finding hope with a new baby
Eliza said she and her husband tried to keep the hope that one day it would happen, and she eventually found herself pregnant again with her daughter, Oakley, now 9 months old.
“Just to get to that point where we had a healthy baby was just over-joyous,” Kinghorn said. “They were happy, I was happy. It can be a really emotional process for everyone involved and having been with them through every step of the process is just part of the reason I love my job.”
Eliza said Oakley didn’t “minimize” or “replace” Hunter, and this day was about remembering him.
Celebrating a life lived briefly
St. Mark’s registered nurse Jenn Serrano turned emotional as well.
“I felt like on the day of his birth, it was really important to not just be sad, but also to celebrate — to celebrate him,” Serrano said. “Just recognize he is a person and he deserves to be cooed and awed over and he deserves to be shown as much love as possible. Even though he was here for a short time, that doesn’t diminish what he is.”
Eliza Sorenson acknowledged the duality of emotions everyone was feeling.
“The grief never goes away — like, we’re always going to miss Hunter,” she said. “You can feel joy again, too, and you can feel both of those emotions at the same time, even though they’re opposite.”
The mother expressed gratitude to both Serrano and Kinghorn.
“Dr. Kinghorn has been so incredible. She’s been with our family on this entire journey, and she’s cried with us and she’s been so great to have by our side,” she said. “Then, I think about ‘Nurse Jen’ and the biggest thing that comes to mind for me with Jen is I think as a nurse it would be easy to approach each shift kind of with the mentality of, oh, it’s just another day at work and kind of go through the motions. But I think about the day that Hunter was born, and she was our nurse that day and this was like the biggest day for our family. It was the day our son passed away, it was the day that our son was born, and so it was a big day for our family, and I felt like she tried to make the day he was born the best day it could possibly be.”
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