An Unfortunate Diagnosis

My husband and I went into our 20 week anatomy ultrasound anxious and excited to see our baby. Sterling hadn’t seen the baby on an ultrasound before so this was a very exciting appointment for us. The tech began the ultrasound and told us we were having a girl! We both wanted a girl so bad so we were over the moon! This excitement lasted for a few minutes until the tech discovered an abdominal defect called an omphalocele. Then she found issues with the baby’s heart. And then she found soft tissue on the end of the baby’s spine which she said could be a neural tube defect. Our excitement quickly turned to fear and sadness. The tech immediately referred us to a specialist but warned us they would offer termination. Our whole lives had been turned upside down in just a few minutes. Going through 5 months of pregnancy believing I had a perfectly healthy baby to suddenly being offered termination? It felt as though my whole world had come crashing down.

It was a painful three days before we could see the specialist. I still had to go to work and it was excruciating. I couldn’t think of anything else and could hardly keep my composure. My well-meaning coworkers asked me questions about the baby so I gave polite answers before escaping to the bathroom to cry. It was finally time for our specialist appointment and it was even worse than I imagined. Any bit of hope I had was crushed as the doctor told us every bad thing that could possibly happen. It was just one thing after another and I remember sitting in that room feeling numb and only half listening. Sure enough we were offered termination and it felt as though that was our only option. We went home from that appointment absolutely devastated and drained. We started doing some of our own research and found stories from families who had gone through similar situations. There were many children who had omphaloceles who ended up living perfectly healthy lives. This gave us some hope so we opted to do an amniocentesis to see if our baby had any fatal genetic conditions that would inhibit her from living a normal healthy life. It was another excruciating two weeks before the results came back from the amnio. Everything came back clear so we decided to continue the pregnancy and give our baby the best chance at living a happy healthy life.