The Endgame

By now, I hadn’t been sleeping well for weeks. I’d been waking up almost every night between 3am and 5am, tossing and turning, finally getting up to pace round the house, eventually going back to sleep again until the alarm went off at 6.30am and I headed back to work.

I was exhausted, and my memory and concentration were suffering. We wondered over and over what could possibly be causing this. There was nothing we could find in either of our family trees which pointed to cases of congenital mental or physical disabilities. Was it in my environment? Was it mobile phones, wifi, pollution, that piece of soft cheese? What had we done to deserve this nightmare?

A final MRI, carried out at 28wks, showed that the brain's mantle was thinner than it should be at that stage of gestation. This, we were told, was a sign that aside from the ventricles squashing his brain, the brain wasn’t developing properly regardless, and even if they could drain the fluid after he was born, he was going to have brain damage.

Overall, our to-ing and fro-ing went on for 9 weeks before we made a decision. We again decided, extremely reluctantly, to end the pregnancy on the basis that our baby would likely have a very poor quality of life, compounded by the fact that he was probably being afflicted by some sort of genetic condition which would put him at the ‘severe’ end of the disabilities scale.

I knew what was coming. I knew in going down the road I was about to go down I was choosing insanity – a just punishment for taking this abhorrent decision. I was once again given a little pot with a pill inside and a glass of water. I took it. We returned to the hospital two days later and once again I lay down in the ultrasound room. I knew that once the consultant put that needle into my stomach and into my baby that my soul would die with him, and there would be no coming back. We asked the consultant to take one last look at his brain, but the black mass had again grown since we’d seen it last, and there was little brain visible on the screen. He put the needle into my stomach, through to our baby, and put him to sleep forever.