Hey Angel-mamas and Papas, I hope you've all had a good week. Mine has been fairly uneventful, the working week has felt like an age but for this next week I'm off on annual leave to do more work on the house and garden. I've been busy this weekend stripping yet more dated wall paper and started on the baby's potential room this morning. Unfortunately I have experienced more spotting this weekend but I'm trying to stay calm as the midwife did say to expect more bleeding to occur due to the subchorionic haemorrhage discovered a couple of weeks ago. However, I have noticed a pattern when I have spotted, apart from the very first time the other episodes have been at the weekend near the end of a pregnancy week (I am 9w tomorrow) and I have been doing wall paper stripping within the same day as well. Although it doesn't happen every week and not every time I do any decorating. It's concerning but I am trying my best not to get paranoid but I can't help my mind drifting back to the two times where we've been here before and it's always ended in heartbreak. As I've mentioned in a previous post, we are entitled to an early scan between 9-11 weeks so I could try and get an appointment for this week to make sure everything is ok. I am tempted to do this and before I was adamant I would take every chance to have a scan but to be honest I'm frightened. I don't know if I'm mentally prepared for bad news. I guess I'll see how things go.
My last post documented our first scan with Passenger, her EDD was mid-late August and we only had to wait another week to see her again and although we were hugely relieved and excited we were still very cautious that we weren't at 12 weeks. I kept the news away from my managers at work and carried on as normal, wish each day away until we could go back to the hospital.
Finally the day came, it was early February 2017 and we stepped back into the ante-natal unit. Typically we saw one of my sister-in-law's friends waiting by the reception, she had just found out she was having twins. It was irritating that we had bumped into someone when we were trying to be so cautious about our news getting out beyond our close family and friends. I had only just delivered the good news to my brother and his daughter who is 7, she was thrilled for us and very excited to have a new little cousin.
We got into the scanning room and I couldn't wait to see Passenger bouncing around in the screen again. The sonographer looked more experienced than the girl who scanned us the week before and started searching for Passenger. Silence. I hate that silence. We waited expectantly. Then I heard some words that shattered my life all over again. "I have some bad news." She said. Tears streamed from me all over again and all I could say was "Not again, not again, not again." The sonographer panicked, and I exalt her asking what I meant by my words. Rob must have explained our past because I certainly didn't. She ran out of the room for a second opinion and the room became a blur to me I couldn't see or hear anything. I couldn't feel Rob next to me. I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't believe this was happening to me again.
Before long the lady came back in with another woman and they prodded and poked me again with the scanning instrument. I tried me best to bite back my tears and keep still but it was very difficult to. We finally saw Passenger on the screen for the last time and what had happened was explained to us. Passenger had been diagnosed with anencephaly, a neural tube disorder (NTD) where the brain and skull fail to form. She had flipped over in my womb and the sonographer showed me her beautiful head. There on the side we didn't see last week was a balloon-like appendage bloating from her head. I could see it, my gorgeous baby. She was still bouncing around and had a lovely strong heartbeat but life for her was impossible. Prognosis for babies with anencephaly is extremely poor or zero chance of survival, they are referred to as "not compatible with life". I cannot explain the shock and sadness I felt when my baby was described in that way, such a cold, clinical statement for a very much loved human being.
I wept aloud in the scanning room and the staff at the hospital can't have liked it much because they once again bundled me into an unused room while an on-call consultant was called to give us our options. I knew the fucking options but this time it was different, Passenger was alive, she had a heartbeat and this presented a huge moral dilemma.
We waited for ages in this room and I wanted to smash everything up. I was beyond angry. Why the fuck did this happen? Hadn't we been punished enough? What was wrong with us? Or me? There has to be a reason why. We had already decided after Bean that we would straight to surgery if anything else happened to us that was the only certain thing in my mind.
The consultant arrived and explained what we already knew. Passenger was not compatible with life and we had to terminate. He gave me the impression that the termination needed to happen as soon as possible as Passenger might make me ill. In the end this was not true but I did feel he wanted us to get the termination very quickly. I want to stress at this point that we did make the decision ourselves but his urgent persuasion did scramble my brain more than it already was.
He explained that anencephaly happens when the neural tube failed to close within the first four weeks after conception. The risk of NTDs are increased by the lack of folic acid in the mother's diet. Therefore, I was asked if I was taking my pregnancy vitamins which I was, in fact I was taking pregnacare and extra folic acid tablets within the first four weeks of Passengers life because they were spare! Another possibility was Passenger had a chromosomal abnormality causing this devastating effect.
I understood all of the terminology in one part of my mind and understood nothing in the other. I just remember feeling incredibly angry. I reacted so differently to when we lost Bean, at that point I felt myself plummet into darkness. But this time I felt I needed to fight, I paced around the room with my back straight and tall, the anger was so raw.
The consultation took hours and we had no signal on either of our phones to even give news to our anxious families. It was obvious something had gone wrong as they had not heard from either of us, I can't imagine their nervous concern, wondering what the hell had happened. Eventually I was booked into surgery for the second time in two days time. We were sent home. I don't remember anything more, my brain full of everything and nothing.
Thanks guys for reading this sensitive post. I have become better at accessing the memories without being pulled back into those painful emotions but I was unable to protect myself today. That day was utterly heartbreaking.
Stay strong Angel Mamas and Papas
Adele xx
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