The VanDemons: November 2008

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Unfortunate news for us

Well what started out as quite an exciting week didn’t end on such a high.

On Tuesday we finally reached the “magic” 12 week mark for our second baby and were getting quite excited about telling everybody our news. We had a routine ultrasound booked for Thursday afternoon and decided to play it safe and wait for the all clear from the scans. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the “all clear”.

I had gone to the scan by myself, Sam was at work, and as far as we could tell, it was just a routine 12 week scan. Anyway, the sonographer had a difficult time getting a clear picture, as the baby kept moving. She went to get to doctor’s okay that the scans were clear enough, but instead of coming back with a simple “yes” had to tell me that the scan had picked up some “abnormalities” and they were currently trying to get in touch with my GP. A few minutes later she came back to let me know that they were unable to reach the GP and instead I needed to go straight to the Obstetrician, he would see me as soon as I got there and that she was “extremely sorry”. It’s never good when your sonographer cries when she tells you she is sorry…

I had Mieks in the pusher and was walking through the hospital, trying to find my way back out again, with tears rolling down my cheeks. I had managed to get in touch with Sam and he was already waiting at the Obstetricians for me. Unfortunately he couldn’t see us straight away, and we waited about 45 minutes, where all sorts of scenarios played through our heads.

When we finally got into see Dr Moloney, he scanned me again and confirmed that there were in fact major abnormalities in the form of a neural tube defect called Anencephaly. The simple explanation was that at around day 26 when the brain and top of the baby’s head are forming, our baby just stopped. So our poor baby was missing most of its brain and the top of its head. It was such a shock and such a sad sad day. There was no real choice as if we had carried the baby until birth, it would have been stillborn, or only lived, at most, for a few hours, never gaining consciousness. The baby would have been blind and deaf.

I spent the day in hospital on Friday. Physically I’m doing pretty well, emotionally, we are both pretty sad – that’s the only word for it. I’m yet to have a decent sleep, I am exhausted, but when I get to bed I don’t sleep very well.

Sam has been amazing and Mieks has been a dream. She keeps doing things that make us laugh. But she decided on Thursday night that her new favourite book was “There is a house inside my Mummy”. So we’ve buried that one deep on the bookshelf.

Sam’s been home this week, and we’ve been trying to move forward by keeping the architect moving on our house plans and that sort of thing. And now there’s Christmas to start planning as a family too…

We wanted to put something here so we would have something to remember the time by...