Disaster?

The past few weeks have put me on the brink of sanity. I have been repeatedly sick this pregnancy, missing days and days of work, exhausted, running a fever, throwing up, etc. etc. Through into the mix a major car accident requiring that we buy a new car and the stress of wondering whether my husband was going to be out of work again due to the sequestration and life already felt barely manageable.



On Friday at the 16 week ultrasound, I waited patiently as the technician made all of her measurements, sitting in the dark and quietly let tears run down my face because it is usually in the silence of the ultrasound room that the loss of my other baby really hits me. It is the place where I learned of the baby. It is the place where I lost the baby. I always ask the technician to turn off the monitor so that I don’t have to see what remains of the second baby. I am usually too fearful to say anything. At the end of the ultrasound, I asked the technician if my cervix was closed and she said yes. That was my big concern…given that loss of a twin can result in premature birth of the other twin. I mentioned that this baby didn’t seem as active as my other children and the technician said that she could see the baby moving around. She said that I should leave the gel on my stomach as the doctor may want to look at a few things. It seemed innocuous enough, but I should have known.


The doctor came in and did some scans and then told me that she couldn’t get a good view of the baby’s feet and legs as it was in the breech position and she had some definite concerns that the baby had club feet, which is associated with a host of neurological and spinal issues, such as spina bifida, cerebral palsy, and others. I tried to process what she was saying. I tried to tell myself that this was similar to the concerns doctors expressed about the size of Nugget’s head that lead to a month of hand-wringing and crying for the last month of my pregnancy with him. I told myself that I wasn’t going to let myself think about all the horrible things this could mean for our baby boy. That night, my husband and I woke up several times crying. This pregnancy has been so rife with angst and pain and sadness that sometimes I just want to end it all so that I don’t have to live in agony like this waiting any more.


We have to wait two more weeks before we can get another ultrasound to check on baby and see if he indeed has club feet or spina bifida, or any of the other horrible things that a genetically normal baby could suffer. Each day is an eternity and I can help but feel that both of us assume that it is a foregone conclusion that this is not a healthy baby and this pregnancy is only going to end in disaster.