I was unable to keep it a secret for anyone I knew over
here, and quickly shared the exciting news of an addition to our family back in
the hot days of summer to all the other moms I knew on the playgrounds. I was
nauseous and dead tired, but it was a happy surprise that we would add another
little one to this unit of ours. Having had an easy first pregnancy I was confident all would
go smooth with this second one, and just curious to experience how the whole
process would be in America compared to my experience in Austria.
The second trimester started off with an ultrasound that
showed abnormalities in the fetus, which resulted in what seemed like endless
screenings, ultrasounds, blood tests, meetings with specialists and genetic
counselors, and beyond all a lot of worry. Ugh!
We are by default connected to a Harvard affiliated
hospital, and they have been amazing and extremely thorough in the whole
process. We have undergone a lot
of genetic and other tests, some of which are still unavailable in Denmark,
Iceland or Austria. This is both good and bad, because they have looked into so
many details that could potentially be something (hello worry…!) but then
turned out to be nothing. As the cardiologist,
who saw us at Boston Children’s Hospital said, we end up having a healthy baby,
but the two of us have lost our mind in this whole process from everything the
doctors (with their best intentions) have put us through.
They have ruled out known genetics disorders (after initially
standing with 50-30% risk for Downs etc.), they have detected a strange
chromosome 2, which turned out to be inherited from me (and hence not
dangerous), they were concerned about the kidneys, which later turned to out to
be okay, and they found a bad heart defect at 20 weeks, which made us schedule
a time for an abortion (which was just heartbreaking). The abortion was
canceled one day before scheduled, because the heart to the cardiologist’s big
surprise looked healthy and normal one week after the initial finding.
All in all it’s been such a rollercoaster ride between happy excitement and
extreme worry, about either preparing for a baby, who was not entirely normal
and healthy or having to decide if the outlooks were so bad that we were not
going to continue.
But here we are now on the doorstep to the final trimester
with a rapidly growing bump that has been examined to the extreme, and which
valuable inside now looks like it should according to the doctors. We have been
left alone for a month, and it’s been a month of searching for and finding trust
in the fact that everything is indeed all right, and letting happiness and
excitement out rule worry and anxiety. It's a gradual process, but we are getting there...
