Sunday 1 March 2009

Dreams turn to dust


It had been a year since I miscarried, and my friend had just died. I don’t know how we managed to conceive at a time like that, but evidently we did. When we found out our news, our first concern was that I might miscarry. But much to our relief, once I got past the 6/7 week mark when miscarriages are most common, we thought, ‘this is in the bag, fantastic’. Oh, how naive we were.

The letter from the hospital soon arrived with the appointment for the first scan, and we skipped into it a few days later, completely oblivious to the fact that this would turn out to be the last day we would ever experience true happiness.

I was 10wks+5days. It didn’t take long for the ultrasound technician to tell us that she was very concerned and that we would be booked in to see the consultant. She said she could see an increased nuchal and an exomphalus containing bowel. What on earth was she talking about? We really couldn’t believe what we were being told. As we rapidly learnt, the nuchal is the fluid at the back of the baby’s neck and if there’s too much, it’s very likely that there’s something wrong with the baby. Some babies do have thick nuchals and turn out fine, but they are the minority. As far as the exomphalus was concerned, it sounded pretty unpleasant, but it is usually a fixable thing. However, the two things together are not a good sign, and so the ultrasound technician had hit the panic button. We went home speechless, and while my husband got straight onto the pc and started researching, I went straight to bed, too depressed to stand.