In November 2006, Brad and I discovered that we were (very unexpectedly) pregnant!
This was somewhat of a shock for us, especially as we had made the decision a few years ago not have children for a number of reasons. So you can imagine our surprise and shock at finding out that we were expecting a child.
I must state very clearly that at no time did we ever consider not having my baby, though some people have questioned our decision to keep the baby after our earlier decision not to have children. To those people (and I hope you read this) I must say that you are not the friends I thought you were. At a time when you should have been happy for us and rejoiced with us in this good news, you put a damper on my pregnancy and as a result on our friendship.
To everyone else, we cannot thank you enough for all the support and love you have given and shown us along the way. We just want to let you know that we appreciate it very much. We look forward to sharing the joy of our baby with you.
Anyway, back to story of my pregnancy so far...
You can track where I am at in my pregnancy in the baby ticker on the bottom of each page. It looks like this:
I've been very lucky in that I've not had morning sickness and the only symptom of pregnancy that I have had is some extreme tiredness early on. But this has now passed, though I do still tire quickly it's not as bad as in those first few months.
We saw our first scans of the baby at 8 weeks, just after we found out. At the time, our little bundle of joy looked like a blobby jelly bean. In fact, I nicknamed it "The Blob" for a while. It was very scary to realise that I was suddenly responsible for growing another life inside mine, one that depended solely on me.
Our next scan took place at 19 weeks, the date was 14 February 2007 and it was the day after we moved into the house we had just bought (but that's another story!) You can see the scans here. At this point, I renamed the baby to "The Alien", you'll see why. Unfortunately, as a result of these scans we were sent to Brisbane for some other scans and received some bad news. I'll tell you about that down below.
After the Brisbane trip, our next and most recent scans took place at about 31 weeks. This were just some growth scans to check on how well the baby is growing, apparentally it's all "within normal ranges", if you can figure out what that means. The good news that the baby has graduated from alien to human, I saw the bump of its nose. I can deny it no longer - I am having a baby. OH MY GOD!
Apart from the seeing is the feeling, for a while now I have been feeling bub move around my belly. It likes to kick and move just when I am going to bed. Oftentimes, it will kick in time to me typing on a keyboard, if I'm hitting them hard enough for it to hear. Whilst the pregnancy has expanded my waist, unless you know I'm pregnant I don't really look it. A couple of times I think I've actually seen, as well as felt, the baby kick me. That was pretty exciting, especially as Brad hasn't really been able to feel the baby move.
As I said earlier, when we went to Brisbane we received some bad news regarding the baby's health. The doctor's have told us that it has a Congenital Heart Defect (CHD) known as Hypoplastic Right Heart/Ventricle Syndrome or HRHS.
We done some research on it, and unfortunately not found very much except the following links:
- http://www.thic.com/hyporight.htm
- http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-hypoplastic-right-heart-syndrome.htm
- http://www.childrenheartinstitute.org/educate/defects/hypor1.htm
- http://www.hlhsinfo.homestead.com/singleventricles.html
Many of these articles are very jargony so I'll try to simplify it, at least as much as I understand it anyway. Basically the right ventricle of the heart is too small to do it's job, which is to receive the old blood and pump it to the lungs to be oxygenated before the left side pumps it back out to the body. Our little bub will have to undergo an operation early on, likely to be in its first week of life. There is no cure or fix perse for this. The operation will basically re-route the blood to bypass the right side of the lungs and feed directly to the lungs.
The good news is that this operation has been performed successfully for many years. The chances are very good that the operation will be a success for our bub. Of course, it all depends on bub's condition when it's born and whether or not there are any other complications. We know that our bub is up for more operations in the future, but if everything goes ok, it should be able to have a relatively normal life.
All this means that I have to go to Brisbane to have the baby. Whilst I'm not looking forward to that, I just keep reminding myself that at least we'll be in the best place for bub to get the help it needs.
I'll try to keep my pages updated, but I don't know how likely that will be. So just keep an eye out here or on my blog or on Brad's webpage for updates and photos.
©
Fiona Marshall (a.k.a. Kawani) 2000 |
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