Chapter II - Joy interrupted

It didn't take long for our joy of having our prayers answered turn to concern about the pregnancy and the health of our little child, including a miscarriage scare early on that sent us, in tears, to the emergency room.

It turned out that scare wouldn't be our last. On Dec. 14, 2005, we got the word that one of the screening tests had come back abnormal. This news would scare any potential parent, but as older parents we were even more worried, knowing the risks of Down Syndrome and other associated risks. My wife tried to reassure me. She said even tests that come back abnormal often turn out to be nothing. We went to have an ultrasound performed immediately upon hearing the news, and an amniocentesis was scheduled. It was a lonely, long time sitting in the room waiting for the ultrasound to begin, but we were still hoping that the odds were in our favor, and that perhaps the risks that our child had a major genetic problem was still no greater than 1 in 45, based on our ages. To a trained eye, the ultrasound reveals a lot about a growing baby. To me, it looked like a really bad shadow-puppet show on a TV with poor reception. Our doctor told us the ultrasound was normal, as we had hoped, but it turned out to be little comfort. My wife asked what were the risks of a chromosomal anomaly based on the abnormal screening results we had just received. The answer stunned us - the odds that our baby had a major genetic anomaly were better than 1 in 5 based on the screening, and we wouldn't know the answer until we got the results from a FISH (fluorescent in-situ hybridization) analysis, which would be hours away. I went back to work and held it all in - I was too scared to mention anything to anyone (in fact, it would be days later before I would tell any of my friends about it.) At home, we tried to have as normal a night as we could with our son Sean, knowing we would soon get a call that would in many ways shape the next several years of our lives.

The call came in around 8 p.m. The FISH results were normal. The joy returned.

Even that wouldn't be the last struggle of the pregnancy. My wife was sick throughout the entire eight months. The doctor sent her to the hospital once to have her examined for pre-eclampsia because her blood pressure was soaring. If she went from pre-eclampsia to full-blown eclampsia, both her life and the baby's could be at risk. We didn't know if she would have to stay overnight. She checked out fine and was sent home. Two weeks later, her doctor examined her again, and again decided to send her to the hospital for pre-eclampsia. Des asked when she would be able to go home. The answer: she would be in the hospital until the baby was born. Our baby wasn't due to be delivered until late May. But my wife's protein levels, which should have been in the low hundreds, were now soaring into the thousands, and her condition was becoming more dangerous with every increase. Our doctored scheduled to deliver her on April 18th. We still didn't know if the many complications throughout the pregnancy would have any effect on our baby, but after all we had been through, we just wanted to be able to look at her face and see a healthy child.

Tomorrow: Chapter III - My Daughter