We had had no appreciation of what we were letting ourselves in for when we turned up for that first, fateful ultrasound. Until then, we simply hadn’t realised that couples who were willing and able to have children could ever find themselves in our situation. We thought the ultrasound was to look at pretty pictures of our baby. But here we were.
I asked the hospital that if we decided that it would be best not to continue, what would happen? I knew after a certain amount of time you had to give birth, but I’d assumed it was quite late on in pregnancy. You give birth after 14 weeks came the reply. Oh my god. So these people expect me to go into labour and deliver our dead child? Are they crazy??
As fate would have it, the day after the 18 week scan I felt my baby move for the first time. Now this really was torture. I was acutely distressed. It’s as if in a matter of moments everything you have ever believed in your whole life counts for nothing: treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. Do not kill.
But we still couldn’t accept what they were telling us. While I knew at an intellectual level that what they were telling us was correct, I needed to hear it from someone else for my heart to really accept it. So I sought out a private ultrasound clinic on Harley St and we raced there, not least because I’d learnt from frantic Googling that there was some debate about whether the corpus callosum could be seen that early in a pregnancy. But this scan showed the same issue – the brain was not in good shape.
No comments:
Post a Comment