Katie Yin’s Birth Story Part 1: The Pain of a Full-Term Stillbirth

Resource: griffincaresfoundation.org

Dr. Fox: Welcome to today’s episode of “Healthful Woman,” a podcast designed to explore topics in women’s health at all stages of life. I’m your host, Dr. Nathan Fox, an OBGYN and maternal-fetal medicine specialist practicing in New York City. At “Healthful Woman,” I speak with leaders in the field to help you learn more about women’s health, pregnancy, and wellness.

All right, Katie, welcome to the podcast. It’s nice to see you in person again.

Katie: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Fox: How you doing?

Katie: These days, never better. I’ve got a six-month-old crawling around, tearing up my apartment probably as we speak.

Dr. Fox: That’s amazing.

Katie: If you had told me six months ago that I would be here today, I definitely wouldn’t have believed you.

Dr. Fox: Wait, you wouldn’t have believed you’d be here talking about your story in the podcast? What do you mean?

Katie: Until you put Kai on my chest…

Dr. Fox: Ahh. Got it.

Katie: …I didn’t believe I was taking him home, and that I was going to have a little terror running around.

Dr. Fox: It’s pretty amazing. So you just left him home alone, just do whatever the hell he wants? It’s all good. Yeah…

Katie: Yep. He’s got his own life, you know?

Dr. Fox: He’s busy. Well, you know, he’s probably posting and, you know, checking his Twitter feed, and…

Katie: Digital natives, that’s right.

Dr. Fox: That’s amazing. That’s so nice.

So we go sort of way back. We’ve had a lot of time together, which is great. But this is really, I guess, our first time to just talk about your whole story start to finish. We were talking about this before offline, that like, this is a really cool opportunity for both of us just to talk.

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. It’s…

Katie: Yeah, you don’t get to debrief, as I said, your pregnancy with your doctor all that often. You like, kind of just… You know, you have your six-month check, and then they say, go enjoy your baby, and we’ll see you next time.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. With your doctor, and thousands of people who are listening as well.

Katie: Right, right.

Dr. Fox: Debrief with all them.

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: So I know you, Katie, but maybe give us a little background about who you are, where you’re from. Just sort of set the stage, and then we’ll start talking.

Katie: Sure. So I met my husband at Columbia, where we both went to college. We started dating shortly after college. So we’ve been here in New York City for a long time, and we got married about five years ago. We were planning to start trying for babies, like, end of 2019, and then obviously COVID put those plans on hold a little bit. We hit a couple of roadblocks, and ended up needing to do fertility treatments, and eventually made the decision to move to IVF, which we did with some pretty quick success. Like, it wasn’t the smoothest infertility journey, but I think all things considered, we felt like we got off pretty easy.

Dr. Fox: Right. So you guys, you’re both living in New York City, and what kind of work are you guys doing?

Katie: Oh, I’m a television producer. I’m a cable news producer. My husband is in finance. And so we’re just kind of…you know, we’re surrounded by all of our college friends.

Dr. Fox: Right.

Katie: We have this full life here, and we’re a pretty happy, newly married couple.

Dr. Fox: Oh, excellent. So you decide to have kids, you’re, I guess…we’re knee-deep in the pandemic, and you’re doing IVF. Was your IVF, like, pandemic-style IVF, where you’re coming in with, like, you know, full body suits, and Frank has to wait in the car outside, and like, that whole thing? Or was it sort of post that?

Katie: Kind of. It was like, we were still… It was pre-vaccination when we started, so we were still… Like, I wasn’t allowed to have visitors at appointments and things like that at first.

Dr. Fox: Right.

Katie: And then, you know, it took us a little while. So I think I probably got pregnant…our transfer was successful around June of ’21.

Dr. Fox: Right.

Katie: So then, by the time I was going through pregnancy, some of the restrictions were starting to relax, and I was probably going to be able to have him with me while I was delivering, and I was having anxiety and everything like that.

Dr. Fox: Yeah, so the bulk of your pregnancy was, I guess, in 2021, and then you ultimately delivered in ’22.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: So how did that pregnancy go? Like, tell me about that.

Katie: Super, I would say, average, low-risk pregnancy. I am an anxious person at baseline, I was close to somebody who had a late stillbirth before, so I was kind of acutely aware that there’s no, like, safe time in a pregnancy, and things can go wrong. But outside of that, we didn’t have a lot of medical complications. I kind of called about one thing or another that I was worried about from time to time, but nothing concerning from my doctor’s standpoint. And we were scheduled and ready to have a low-risk 39-week induction right up at the end.

Dr. Fox: Right, so you, essentially you’re, as some would call it, a low-risk pregnancy.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: I mean, whether you call IVF high-risk…whatever.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: But basically you’re fine, you’re healthy, you’re doing well, everything’s going okay, baby’s okay.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: And you’re planning a 39-week induction, which is…I don’t want to say unusual, because it’s perfectly fine, obviously, but you’re saying you were specifically doing that because you had concerns about a stillbirth.

Katie: Right. I was anxious. It was sort of a distant family member who had had this stillbirth. And so while the, I think, family history wasn’t considered significant, my OB understood that, like, I was really worried about this, and that, you know, just for everybody’s sanity, we could go ahead and schedule a 39-week induction.

Dr. Fox: Right. Right. And so, what happened leading up to that?

Katie: I had had a couple of growth scans toward the end because of IVF, and because I was on thyroid medication, so I had a growth scan at 38-plus zero, 38 weeks, zero days, everything looked good, good heartbeat, and she was growing well. And then four days later, I had my just routine 38-week visit. I, everything…you know, was running late for the appointment, everything kind of felt normal. And I went in for my visit, we were talking through my induction, which was scheduled for three days later, and so she was talking about how that would go, should you get an epidural, should you not get an epidural? How dilated was I, which was not at all, and she was kind of saying, are you sure you want to get induced? And then kind of as she was about to send me on my way out the door, she said, let’s just get a quick ultrasound, and check on the baby, and that’s when, unfortunately, we saw that there was no heartbeat, which was kind of a shocker, too… Well, of course to me it was, like, earth-shatteringly devastating. I think it also shocked my doctor quite a bit.

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Katie: And you know, it was hard to know what to make of it at the time. It was sort of like my whole world shut down a little bit. My memories, I’m still in trauma therapy over all of this, so we talk about my memories being very blurry of this moment. I didn’t, like, burst into tears or anything, it was more like I shut down, and everything was kind of a blur for the rest of the day.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. Were you alone at that visit?

Katie: I was, yeah. So it was still sort of… I think by then we were probably allowed to have visitors, but it was just sort of a shadow of COVID, and we were used to Frank not coming to the routine visits. And we weren’t expecting anything. We had just had a big, you know, fancy scan a few days ago where we’d seen the baby, this was really just a cervical check to see how miserable my induction was going to be.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. In hindsight, do you have a sense of when you felt the baby move prior to that?

Katie: Yeah, so I’ve thought nonstop about this, I think, since.

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Katie: I definitely, in retrospect, felt some differences in the morning. I still noticed some movement in the morning.

Dr. Fox: Wow.

Katie: And my last clear memory of feeling movement was in the shower, before the appointment. I did not do a kick count that morning, which I normally did the first time, you know, first thing when I woke up every day, but I was kind of running late today, so I didn’t do one. But I had felt her moving in the shower, I actually felt her, like, tumble, I thought, in the shower, and was thinking, oh, great, like, she’s changed positions, and she’s going to be breach now, or some kind of other curveball I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t notice her moving when I was walking across the park to my doctor’s visit. And I kind of mentioned that on my way in the door. She said, you know, how are you feeling? Are you feeling the baby move, and I said, yeah, she was moving a lot this morning. I’m not feeling her now. And the doctor kind of said, oh, well, that’s fine, you know, this morning is good, and she’s probably asleep, or something like that.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. Yeah.

Katie: And which is why I think she wasn’t suspicious enough to do an ultrasound at the beginning of the appointment, and kind of waited as a formality until the end.

Dr. Fox: Right. Right. What do you remember about from that point, now you have to deliver the baby, right?

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: And so, she must have gone over, you know, the options… And again, it’s the same process you went through, it’s an induction, but obviously it’s much more horrible in that sense.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: Do you have memories of that?

Katie: Yeah. So I mean, she had just kind of talked me through how an induction was going to go, assuming I was going to have a living baby. So kind of her advice was, okay, well, do all of that, but like, definitely get an epidural right away.

Dr. Fox: Right. Right.

Katie: So, you know, at this point, like, I remember saying after I delivered Ellie that I didn’t feel any pain because my epidural was so great, and that labor wasn’t so hard, and someone said, well, you might’ve just been a little numb, like, in general.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. Yeah.

Katie: And I think that that was true. I think that there was a lot of kind of checking out, zoning out that I did just to sort of survive those couple of days. So, you know, we headed straight to the hospital, and my husband met me there. It was all sort of kind of surreal and unbelievable, and very hard to grasp, because I still felt very pregnant, and I could still feel Ellie, you know? She wasn’t moving, but I could feel that I was still pregnant with her. So it was very difficult to sort of accept that this had happened, I think, for both of us. We had to have more confirmation scans at the hospital once we got there, and we asked, on the advice of the people we knew who had had a previous stillbirth, if we could have an amnio before we started the induction process. So that was another thing that kind of kicked off our experience in the hospital.

Dr. Fox: Right. You mean to get genetic testing to see if there was a cause, to identify a cause?

Katie: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Fox: I mean, that was good advice, but it is hard to, you know, process that, and think about that at the time.

Katie: Yeah. We kind of got into, like, business mode a little bit.

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Katie: It’s sort of like, okay, this happened, and it’s horrible. I need to do everything I can to figure out… I was just, like, kind of instantly obsessed with, okay, what happened? What went wrong? And how can we not miss our chance to figure that out? So…

Dr. Fox: Are you guys both like that? Meaning, are you and Frank both similarly, I guess, focused, I guess is the right word, in that scenario? Because people go, obviously, in many different directions when they get such horrible news.

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: And they’re all fine, like, reasonable obviously, but different people sort of…I don’t know, cope is the right word, different people just respond or react differently.

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: Were you guys sort of on the same page with that?

Katie: I’d say we were opposites. And I think it’s kind of a good thing that we were. It was helpful for me. Frank really seemed to go into, like, support-my-wife-mode. Like, he, the most…the most horrible thing, obviously, was losing Ellie, but he kind of could not believe that now I had to go into labor, and deliver a seven-pound baby, you know?

Dr. Fox: Yeah. Yeah.

Katie: So he was very much just focused on, like, okay, how can we get you through this? And you know…

Dr. Fox: He’s a good man.

Katie: Yeah. Yeah. So he was there, doing the emotional support, and I was sort of messaging people, and doctors we knew, and trying to figure out, like, is there anything we missed, and is there anything that we should ask for? And people were really helpful…I think shocked that I was texting them under the circumstances.

Dr. Fox: Right.

Katie: Like, why aren’t you just kind of hiding in the hospital?

Dr. Fox: Right.

Katie: But really helpful, and I’m glad we got that amnio to sort of dispel doubt that we had missed something genetically.

Dr. Fox: Right. Did you also get any advice from whoever, you know, whoever you’re reaching out to about, like, emotional support at that time, you know? Because there’s all these questions like, you know, do we take photos with the baby, do we…

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: You know, all sort of those types of things, that it’s very hard to make these decisions, and what’s right, and is it going to work, is it not…?

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: And were you getting advice in that realm also?

Katie: We were, from the people we knew who had experienced a stillbirth before. And it’s really hard…it’s really hard to make some of those decisions when you’re in the thick of it, because I was really scared to hold a baby, my baby who had passed away.

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Katie: Like, I couldn’t imagine what that would be like, and struggled with the decision to do it. I mean, I knew I was going to hold her, I knew I was going to see her… I thought I wouldn’t want to be confronted with pictures of her. I thought that if, you know, I saw them accidentally on my phone or something, that I’d be traumatized later. And I got some pretty emphatic advice to just take the pictures. And you never have to look at them if you don’t want to, but just take the pictures.

Dr. Fox: Right, hide them somewhere…yeah.

Katie: And it turned out that in the weeks following Ellie’s birth, and even now, it was really comforting to me that I could have them, and look at her, and remember what she looked like. And if that memory had faded, you know, as it kind of quickly can, that would have been pretty devastating.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. I mean, obviously, I’ve sadly spoken to a lot of people who’ve had stillbirths, and there’s such a wide range from some people who just cannot sort of think of this child as one of their children because it’s too painful, right?

Katie: Right. Right.

Dr. Fox: And you know, they can’t hold the child, they don’t want to look at pictures of the child, and they try not to think about him or her, and…okay, totally understandable. And there’s others, on the other hand, if you ask them, you know, how many children do I have, you know, they list that child with a name, and with…you know?

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: Like sort of as any other child, and they’ll say, you know, I have one son, and I have a daughter who passed away.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: And there’s everything in between. And there’s no right or wrong, obviously. It’s sort of how different people feel about this. But as you said, no one’s prepared to think about this, and make these decisions, and it’s just…I can’t understand how people come to those decisions. You just sort of go with your gut, I guess.

Katie: It’s really hard. We had a social worker speak with us, you know, kind of… It’s just a ton of information coming at you…

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Katie: …I think, like, within hours of finding out that you lost your baby, who you expected to take home, you know, four days later, in our case. And there was a lot that they were asking us, you know, do you want religious services? Do you want to do an autopsy? What are your funeral arrangement plans? Things like that, that I’m like, I can’t even understand the question that you’re asking me right now.

Dr. Fox: Right. Yeah.

Katie: And I think we had to have those conversations pretty repetitively. We had a nurse named Ashley, who I’ll never forget, who mercifully kind of asked the social worker if she would take a pause, and just reminded us that we didn’t need to make those decisions, you know, in an instant, and that we could change our minds, and that we would have time to think about it even after Ellie was born, how we wanted to proceed. So I’ll always be grateful for that.

Dr. Fox: Mm-hmm. Do you have recollection of the birth itself?

Katie: I do. I felt like my induction, my labor, and the birth was as medically physically smooth as it could have been, which was a mercy. It was… You know, I had the epidural from before we started anything, my husband and I kind of cuddled in bed with movies, thank goodness he could be there, and we were past those restrictions. And I pushed, like, four times, and she was delivered pretty easily, and with minimal, you know, complications for me. So it was very quiet, I think is my memory. They’re…you know, I think…I feel like in my memory, I don’t know if this is accurate, the OB was sort of speaking in whispers, and was trying to be very calming. And after Ellie was born, obviously, there was no crying, and she was kind of… It was my decision that I didn’t want to see her until she was kind of cleaned up and dressed, you know, wrapped up, yeah.

Dr. Fox: Yeah, wrapped..yeah.

Katie: So she was whisked away pretty quickly, and then we were kind of left alone for a while. I wanted to feel ready before I held her, and I think my husband agreed with that. So it probably took…I’m not sure. Like, time is really elastic in these memories. But I think it took maybe an hour before I said, okay, you know, I’m ready to see her. And then it became, okay, I have to see her now, and hurry up, and like, where is she?

Dr. Fox: Right.

Katie: And so, I don’t know. All in all, I think the birth, like, I remember it as a pretty special experience with her. It was my first time going through a labor and delivery. I feel like she and I got to experience that together, even though she had passed already. And I kind of treasure those final memories with her, even though that probably sounds weird to say.

Dr. Fox: No, I don’t think it sounds weird at all. I mean, this is… I mean, your memories with her are going to include your pregnancy and delivery.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: I mean, that’s…sadly, obviously, those are your memories with her. But that’s your time together.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: That’s your bond. And I think that makes a lot of sense, that that’s what you remember, and that’s what you hold dear. And I mean, how do you get through a horrible situation like that, obviously, but I think that that is something that you’re going to fortunately, under the circumstances, always have.

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: You’ll have those memories. And for you, you know, the photos will be able to bring back those memories that are obviously very painful, but also whatever comfort you could possibly get afterwards, it’s going to be that you had that opportunity to hold her and spend time with her, and you know, have the birth with her, and then it went smoothly, and it wasn’t… The birth itself wasn’t a trauma.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: Like, I mean, at least the birth went smoothly, under the circumstances.

Katie: And I was so grateful for that. Because I do know people who went on to have complicated deliveries, after learning that they had lost their baby.

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Katie: You can’t sort of fathom enduring physical pain, risk to yourself, risk to your future fertility or ability to carry a baby. So I was really grateful that it was so uncomplicated.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. And I imagine your memories are accurate, that the OB was probably speaking quietly, lights dim.

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: I mean, this is…yeah, it’s not the time to be a cheerleader, and count to ten.

Katie: Right. Right.

Dr. Fox: It’s much more somber, and…you know, obviously. And it’s very hard to be on that end as well.

Katie: Yeah. I can imagine.

Dr. Fox: I mean, not to the same degree that you guys are in, but it is hard. It’s horrible to try to… No one knows what the right thing to do is, and you want to just help someone get through in the least traumatic way possible. So generally, people go into the, you know, quiet, calm…

Katie: Calming, yeah.

Dr. Fox: …you know, try to keep this as, you know, I guess soothing as humanly possible under the circumstances.

Katie: Yeah. I felt like she was trying to minimize our pain physically and emotionally, which was appreciated at the time.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. When were you able to go home?

Katie: So I think I started to have a more intense emotional reaction, obviously, while I was holding Ellie, and after I was holding Ellie. So up until that time, I think I was a little bit suppressed. That’s when things are blurry, and I was just sort of zonked, and not fully processing what was happening. After Ellie was born, really after we kind of held her and said goodbye to her, that was when I started to feel incredibly agitated, and it was really hard for me to sit with those feelings in the hospital. So, you know, I had a feeling that I needed desperately to get out of the room that I delivered in, so I became very insistent. And I usually try to be a, you know, pleasant, patient person to be around, I became very insistent that you have to get us out of this room right now. Like, move us to some floor…I didn’t want to go to a postpartum floor.

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Katie: So they were looking for a regular room for us, that took some time. And then we got to the regular room, and I was like, I can’t be here either. I have to go home. Yeah.

Dr. Fox: I’ve got to go home. Yeah.

Katie: So I was a little bit frantic and desperate to get out of the hospital. I messaged my OB in the portal, and said can I get out of here, and then I asked a nurse to ask the doctor who was on call if I could get out of here. And the on-call OB came by and said, you know, yeah, you seem fine. You can go home. I was so, so grateful to be able to go home, and that my husband and I…my husband didn’t have to… For some reason I was really upset about the fact that he’d have to sleep in a recliner next to me all night, like that he had to be uncomfortable… This was just a terrible experience for all of us, and we should get to be in our own bed. So I was really grateful that we were able to be home.

As soon as I walked through the door of my apartment, I got a message back from my OB in the portal saying, no, you really should stay. We sort of don’t know if anything’s up with you, and we want to monitor your blood pressure, etc. But it was too late. I pretended I didn’t see it, and I stayed at home, and slept in my own bed that night, so…

Dr. Fox: Yeah. After you get home, over the next, let’s say, month, couple weeks to a month, what was it that you found helpful, or things that brought you comfort during that horrible time period? If anything. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah. I mean, it was hard. My husband and I had, I think, in this case pretty opposite reactions, too, and I think we were there for each other. Like, it bonded us pretty strongly as a couple, because we were the only people who were really living in this universe. Obviously, our families were too, but we were the ones who kind of have lost our baby, so there was a sense that it was the two of us in it together, and sort of living in this bubble. He was…he needed to stay in that bubble for as long as possible, so he kind of shut out the text messages and the condolences, and he didn’t really want to see anybody, and didn’t want to talk to anybody. I felt pretty desperate to hear from people who had been through this before. Because I think my feeling was that the intensity of the pain was so great, that I needed a sense that I would survive it. Like, it was just really difficult to get through each day, so I wanted to hear from people that, you know, one way or another, this will get better, you know, here’s how I kept going, here’s sort of what you can do.

And so I was sort of feverishly reaching out to people on social media who I saw who had posted about their late stillbirths, and people I knew who had experienced pregnancy loss. It was surprising, there were people who I was probably less close to in my life, who were incredibly supportive in terms of checking in and staying checked in, who I’m now definitely closer with because of Ellie. So I think of those as the little Ellie gifts in my life. I have one friend who… We delivered Ellie on February 15, 2022, so I have a friend who still checks in the 15th of every month, just to let me know that she’s still thinking of Ellie. So those moments, those people were very treasured, people who kind of let me know that they were thinking of her, and kept her memory alive.

And importantly, like, you know, the food shows up at your house, and the two weeks after, I think everybody always says this, when you lose a family member, it’s the six weeks after when people sort of, you know, move on, and you’re still stuck there in your grief, that I felt really grateful for the people who didn’t leave me alone.

Dr. Fox: Yeah, I think that that’s been a recurring theme. And again, some people don’t want to hear from anybody. Okay.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: But for people who do get comfort from hearing from people, from people reaching out, it essentially…the rule is if you don’t know whether to reach out, reach out.

Katie: Exactly.

Dr. Fox: And it’s just like, it’s almost…it’s never going to be a problem, right?

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: And it’s always… Again, like you said about your friend who’s reaching out every month, it’s… Number one, they’re checking in on you, but like you said, it also keeps Ellie alive. It keeps her around, you know?

Katie: Right. Right.

Dr. Fox: Otherwise, like, part of the trauma of this is your fear that she’s going to be forgotten.

Katie: Exactly.

Dr. Fox: And so when people remember her, it helps, you know, keep her…it just keeps her memory alive, which is just so special.

Katie: There’s a weird thing, especially with stillbirth, where it’s treated…you know, you’re not sure sort of how to describe whether you’ve lost a child, or lost a pregnancy, if that makes sense.

Dr. Fox: Right. Yeah.

Katie: So there are some people who respond as if, oh, you were so close to having a baby, and you didn’t. That must be so, you know, sort of disappointing. And those were kind of the well-intentioned messages that really broke my heart.

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Katie: Because to me, I saw her as my first child, and a very big part of my family, not an almost baby.

Dr. Fox: Right.

Katie: So I was really grateful for the people that kind of understood that, or you know, were able to understand from what I was saying that that was my feeling about her, and respond in kind.

Dr. Fox: Yeah, I mean, that’s such an important message, you know? And we’ve had other people come on and talk about stillbirth, and that is definitely another theme that comes up, that a lot of times, very well-intentioned, loving people say things that are very painful.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: They don’t mean to, obviously.

Katie: Right.

Dr. Fox: It’s just because they don’t know what to say, or they just say the wrong thing. And so part of, like, these stories is not just support for you, and not just support for people who have gone through something similar to you, but it’s also sort of messaging to people who have loved ones who are going through this, like, this is what you’re thinking, this is what you’re experiencing, here are things that are helpful, here are things that are not helpful. Like, please avoid those [crosstalk 00:25:33.408]

Katie: Right. Exactly. We have… I’m grateful to have been hooked up with a support group called Griffin Cares that was really instrumental to me, and still is, in my recovery, and they have basically handouts you can send to your family members to say here are the do’s and don’ts for talking to me about my loss. I wish I had had that sooner, but it’s really helpful.

Dr. Fox: Wow. I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to stop here, and then we’re going to pick up again to talk about your next pregnancy. But thank you so much for coming on and talking about your first pregnancy, your loss with Ellie. It’s very painful to talk about, obviously, but it’s so important, whether you do or don’t find this therapeutic…you’re nodding yes, but even if you didn’t, you know, it is…

Katie: It’s very healing. No, I think it’s healing, to be able to talk about it.

Dr. Fox: It is so important for us to hear your story, to sort of know what you went through, and what you go through, and to be able to help others who may, unfortunately, have to go through this at some point. So really, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for doing this. Because it’s not easy, but I really do appreciate it.

Katie: Thank you. No, it isn’t. It’s not easy, but it is a privilege, and it does make me feel a little bit lighter to be able to talk about her. So, thank you.

Dr. Fox: Excellent.

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